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And all is well, tho* faith and form 
Be sundered in the night of fear; 

Well roars the storm to those that hear 
A deeper voice across the storm. 

— Tennyson. 


THE OLD FAITH 
IN THE NEW DAY 


BY 

JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 

H 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 





V 


Copyright, 1915, by 
JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 


The Bible text used in this volume is taken from 
the American Standard Edition of the 
Revised Bible, copyright, 1901, by 
Thomas Nelson & Sons, and 
is used by permission. 


♦ 

*) 


* * 
« *•«' 



SEP 14 1915 

©CU411474 



MY FATHER 

A PREACHER OF THE OLD FAITH 


IN A FORMER DAY 



9 







CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface 9 

I. Our Indispensable Inheritance 11 

II. The Modern Increment 35 

III. The Increasing Christ 93 

TV. The Vindicated Scriptures : 131 

V. Concerning the Church 171 

VI. An Adequate Evangel 215 



PREFACE 


No man can claim imperative necessity 
for a new book on a theme as frequently 
treated as that of the present volume. In 
this particular case the author does not so 
much as recall that anyone has asked him to 
publish his views, so that even the polite and 
once popular fiction of being urged by his 
friends is denied him. There is, however, 
the extenuating fact that books are by no 
means like living people: bad ones do not 
crowd their betters out of the way; so that 
no other volume is likely to be despoiled of 
its deserts by this one. The following chap- 
ters embody the conclusions which some fif- 
teen years of active ministry, in three quite 
characteristic and representative cities, 
have brought to the author; and the sub- 
stance of them having been received with 
gratifying response by gatherings of min- 
isters and laymen of his own denomination, 
and others, he ventures to present them 


10 PREFACE 

somewhat more fully in this less fugitive 
form. 

If the reader feels any irregularities of 
style or disconnections of spirit between the 
chapters, it is due to say that they have 
been written at such times as the author 
could get and not in the congenial leisure 
of which books are presumably the product. 
He has written in a downtown office amid 
the roar of a city’s life, on trains, in still 
watches of the night, and during summer 
days beside the sea. But whatever may 
be the discrepancies of achievement, his 
purpose has been single, namely, to pro- 
voke his brethren of the ministry to some 
insights into our common faith and its 
present-day factors, which shall lead them 
toward that larger certainty and usefulness 
the Church and the age alike demand. If 
what he has written shall accomplish such 
a result, it will be of little importance 
whether his specific conclusions are accepted 
or rejected; his purpose in their publication 
will have been obtained. 

Kansas City, Missouri. 


I 

OUR INDISPENSABLE 
INHERITANCE 


You see the great breaker that comes with 
its white crest rolling in upon the beach. How 
fine it is! It is the vanguard of the incoming 
tide, but wherein lies the explanation of its career? 
It is in the momentum of the sea behind it. It 
would not come, it would not rise, it would not 
break, it would not creep up the beach, if it were 
not for the roll and swell of the mighty sea behind 
it; and our farthest reach to-day is chiefly because 
of the swell of the humanity that is behind us. 

If we are doing nothing noble ourselves, and 
if we care nothing for what serious men are doing 
to-day, it is impossible that any part of the past 
should appear great to us. Because men and 
women love now, they turn with eagerness to the 
glorious lovers in generations gone by; because 
men and women toil, struggle, hope, fear, rejoice 
and weep to-day, they wish to know of others 
greater than themselves who went the same wild 
mysterious way. Earnestness in the conduct of 
one’s own life is the indispensable condition of 
any deep and true appreciation of the past. — 
Gordon: Revelation and the Ideal, pp. 108, 284. 


CHAPTER I 


OUR INDISPENSABLE 
INHERITANCE 

In certain very clearly marked respects 
the age in which we live is the most notable 
of human history. The one hundred years 
and more which have just passed have 
witnessed the most rapid and marvelous 
changes in society and life accomplished in 
any period of time. Up to the year 1800 
there had been made seven great discov- 
eries or inventions; in the century imme- 
diately following there were added thirteen 
more. In these one hundred years human- 
ity passed from the stage coach to the 
limited express, from the sailing vessel to 
the Mauretania, from hand-to-hand conflicts 
beneath the flapping canvas of wooden 
frigates to the floating fortresses of our 
modern navies with their incredibly destruc- 
tive power; from tedious letter- writing and 
irregular mails to intercontinental cables 
and marconigrams ; from the silhouette to 
13 


14 


THE OLD FAITH 


the photograph; from the letter press to 
the graphophone; from the pantomime to 
the moving picture ; from M. Lecocq to the 
dictograph. In this century medicine rose 
from guess-work diagnosis and surgical 
atrocities to the X-ray and anaesthesia, the 
whole healing science being revolutionized 
by the advances of the past fifty years. 
Within the memory of men who have not 
yet voted, wireless telegraphy has been 
developed to scientific and commercial suc- 
cess, the aeroplane has passed from the 
dream to the practical deed, and the poles 
of the earth have been discovered. In 
world-politics have occurred changes so 
great that they are not yet fully compre- 
hended. J apan has become a world-power, 
China a republic, and the United States has 
colonies in the Pacific Ocean and the Car- 
ibbean Sea. Within our own land society 
has made amazing advances from the polit- 
ical axioms of its founders. In these one 
hundred and fifteen years it has moved 
from the narrowest interpretations of 
representative government to the broadest 
popular democracy; from Negro slavery 


IN THE NEW DAY 


15 


to a most inclusive theoretical equality 
before the law; from the seclusion and lim- 
itation of women to women’s suffrage. 

“Nothing in it (the nineteenth century) 
was quite so picturesque as the discovery 
of America, or the circumnavigation of 
the globe, nor quite so revolutionary as the 
astronomy of Copernicus, and nothing so 
beautiful was produced as a Greek Venus 
or a Gothic cathedral, but it invaded more 
fields, it destroyed more traditions, it made 
more discoveries, it did more constructive 
work, and, in all the range from the work- 
shop to the library, it scattered its bounties 
with the lavish hand of enrichment.” 1 The 
peril of an age so enriched and so trans- 
formed is the peril of every swiftly moving 
generation, namely, an impatience with 
what has preceded it. In 1835 Joseph 
Mazzini wrote: “What we have to do is 
to fix our eyes upon the future while we 
break the last links of the chain that binds 
us to the past. ... We have emancipated 
ourselves from the abuses of the past; let 
us now emancipate ourselves from its 


1 Samuel George Smith: Democracy and the Church, p. 272. 


16 


THE OLD FAITH 


glories.” 1 With the particular conditions 
and specific import which Mazzini had in 
mind, that may have been a fitting declara- 
tion; but the literal meaning, too widely 
avowed now and particularly in respect of 
religious ideas, leads to personal and social 
disaster. 

There is, as we all recognize, a danger- 
ous clinging to the past. “It were better 
to have no history than to have the most 
splendid of its years to be but a succession 
of iron bands.” 2 But that is not the only 
alternative. History is not law, it is life; 
life that has been fresh and vigorous and 
human as our own. The past is not a geo- 
graphical area which we can cut away with 
a stroke or isolate wholesale as map-makers 
discriminate States or countries by print- 
ing them in different colors. The past is 
the undying tree, vast and mighty, with 
great roots that reach far down to the be- 
ginnings of things, the undying tree of 
which our day is but the latest bit of new 
branch, passing into the old even as to- 


1 Essays: Camelot Edition, p. 41. 

2 Fairbairn: Studies in Religion and Theology, p. 49. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


IT 


morrow comes. And all that we hold rich 
and beautiful and good has its beginnings 
in this past, of which we ourselves are al- 
ready becoming a part. “All that we 
possess,” wrote David Swing, “has come to 
us by way of a long path. There is no 
instantaneous liberty or wisdom or lan- 
guage or beauty or religion. Old philos- 
ophies, old agriculture, old domestic arts, 
old sciences, medicine, chemistry, astron- 
omy, old modes of travel and commerce, 
old forms of government and religion have 
all come in gracefully or ungracefully and 
have said ‘Progress is king, and long live 
the king!’ ” 1 

We stand to-day in the flush of a new 
and expanding civilization. The glamour 
of great deeds our brothers everywhere are 
doing shines upon our eyes. The conceit 
of the contemporaneous is on us. In an 
age of great wealth, great armies, great 
industries, great inventions, and great 
achievements in the realms of natural and 
applied science, we are too prone to look 
upon all other generations with impatience, 

1 Quoted by Hillis: Investment of Influence, p. 111. 


18 


THE OLD FAITH 


and regard their attainments with the easy 
tolerance of an obvious superiority. But at 
most the distinctive and characteristic ele- 
ments of the present are the increment 
accumulating upon a rich and splendid 
inheritance from a noble past. It is that 
past as it is related to religion which forms 
the subject of the immediate chapter. 

By reason of the religious ideas it has 
bequeathed us the past is the first effective 
influence in the religion of to-day. “The 
ancients,” said Sidney Smith, the most 
noted wit of the early nineteenth century, 
“have stolen all our ideas.” 

In the pride of modern thought we are 
apt to forget that the fundamental concep- 
tions of truth, the conceptions which we 
are wont to consider peculiarly our own, 
have come down to us by Professor Swing’s 
“way of a long path.” It has been for some 
recent years quite the fashion to descant 
about the Fatherhood of God; and some of 
those most concerned to maintain their 
position as advanced and liberal thinkers 
iterate their allegiance to the doctrine as 
if they were turning over a new leaf in the 


IN THE NEW DAY 


19 


book of Revelation; but the Aryan peoples, 
centuries before the Christian era, had 
learned to look to the bending sky above 
them and say, “All-Father.” Our age has 
brought to the thought of human brother- 
hood a new emphasis, and government, 
literature, the Church, industry, philan- 
thropy, and the home are feeling the effects. 
But there is not a modern stress or passion, 
not a modern sensitiveness to social wrong 
or vision of injustice; there is not a modern 
recognition of the inseparable connection 
between true religion and its expression in 
the life of society, which cannot be found 
in the pages of the Hebrew prophets. Our 
generation has thought that it was a dis- 
coverer, sailing like some spiritual Colum- 
bus to find a new passageway of religious 
and social substance and interpretation ; 
instead it has been simply a belated voyager 
landing at last on shores that braver feet 
had trodden centuries ago. 

The popular spirit of our age is hostile 
to the creeds. The doctrinal confessions of 
the Church, torn from their places in the 
great movement of Christian history, are 


20 


THE OLD FAITH 


flouted by the present day. The noble 
affirmations of belief, so necessary for the 
very life of the Church and the faith in the 
battle days of early heresy, are compla- 
cently regarded as curios of ancient specula- 
tion, their stately language held to be a 
burdensome fetter, and their metaphysical 
discriminations regarded as archaic speci- 
mens of hair-splitting de luxe. “The day 
of the creeds is passed,” is the modern cry. 
But is it not significant that the substance 
of the creeds is not? Amid all the break- 
ing of ancient forms and the rejection of 
ancient statements and interpretation, the 
great ideas the past so clearly disengaged 
and firmly established are the ideas with 
which the modern day is yet concerned. 

Moreover, these ideas of the past have 
been the determining factors in human life. 
The truths of religion have been the forces 
of history. “The empire of Rome,” said 
ex-President Roosevelt in his lecture before 
Oxford University in 1910, “is the most 
stupendous fact of lay history; no empire 
later in time can be compared with it.” 1 


1 History as Literature, p. 78. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


21 


But what was it that conquered Europe 
and transformed Teuton and Slav and 
Hun and Gaul and Goth and Saxon from 
their varied savagery into their better civ- 
ilizations? Not the Roman empire, for all 
the tramp of her undefeated legions and 
the glisten of her undipped eagles from the 
Mediterranean to the German Ocean, from 
the vineyards of Hispania to the beaches 
of the Black Sea. It was Christianity that 
conquered Europe, the great ideas trans- 
muted into living forces. In forest and 
city, on peninsula and island, the Christian 
gospel with its characteristic ideas went; 
they met Saracen and savage on the battle- 
field and fought the better wars of peace 
in hall and hut, and when the ancient Ro- 
man empire was long since dead, and the 
Holy Roman Empire but a fading dream, 
the constituent ideas of Christianity pos- 
sessed the transformed field. We may 
reject and alter the forms in which those 
ideas have come down to us, but the ideas 
themselves remain with undiminished force 
and unimpoverished meaning. As one of 
our most recent writers on the theme has 


22 


THE OLD FAITH 


finely put it, “In the mighty past were 
fashioned for us great continents of faith, 
and voyage as men may in search of those 
islands of the blest about which they dream, 
the continents will still remain the home of 
their largest and richest life .” 1 We do 
well to remember these things. 

Our age is challenging every formula 
and institution. It is pushing out on new 
areas of experience and endeavor. It is 
refashioning its beliefs and theories and 
restating its ideals. All this is but to say 
that it is a living age. Its impatience with 
the past is, in a measure, proper. We must 
not be fettered to dead men. We must not 
be imprisoned in outgrown ideas. We 
must not be fed upon the shells of truth 
from which the substance has long since 
withered. But while it is progress to rebel 
against the bondage of ancient forms, it is 
suicide to break with fundamental and 
undying truths. 

The past is a formative influence upon 
our modern religion also by reason of the 
facts and experiences which it furnishes 


1 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 78. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


23 


with which we interpret the facts and expe- 
riences of our own life. Whether we accept 
the facts in the same mood as the men of 
the past accepted them, whether we inter- 
pret our experiences in the way in which 
the men of the past interpreted their expe- 
riences, is not important for the truth here. 
To reject the interpretations of the past is 
nevertheless to use the past in making our 
own interpretation. And very subtly, but 
inevitably, the facts and experiences which 
the past furnishes have their part in de- 
termining our attitude toward and our use 
of the facts and experiences of our own life. 
They become the standards by or against 
which we work out our own beliefs and con- 
duct. 

There is the history of Israel, her rela- 
tions to the peoples around her, and the 
stages in her own development from the 
patriarchal age into the most thorough- 
going and articulated theocracy the world 
has known, with the parallel development 
out of the current Semitic mythology and 
belief of the pure monotheism which is 
Israel’s first gift to humanity. There are 


24 


THE OLD FAITH 


the facts of her internal history, the build- 
ing of the nation, the growth of the reli- 
gious system, the clearly delineated con- 
ceptions of sacrifice, the social problems 
which find preservation in the pages of the 
prophets, the deepening and enriching of 
Israel’s religion and life by events of war, 
catastrophe, defeat, and exile which swept 
other nations into atheism. There are the 
profound expositions of national and indi- 
vidual experience accomplished in the 
psalms, the only instance in all human his- 
tory and literature where the hymns of a 
single people have become the choicest 
devotional handbook of the world at large. 
There is the inscrutable but undeniable fact 
of Hebrew prophecy, especially the proph- 
ecy, not of one man or of one age, but 
of many men of all ages, of a Divine 
Saviour who should come upon the earth. 
Then there is the fact, so coincidental as 
to establish the case for miracle itself, the 
fact of the New Testament history, the sub- 
lime ideals and instruction, which, for all the 
centuries since then, have remained the 
supreme word for personal character and 


IN THE NEW DAY 


25 


conduct and hope. In that history is the 
fragmentary record of a single life, which, 
with only this fragment recorded, has yet 
changed the course of all succeeding his- 
tory, revolutionized the standards of na- 
tional and individual behavior, and stamped 
its imprint on every institution which is 
characteristic of our modern civilization. 

Coming for a moment outside of the his- 
tory peculiarly recorded in the Bible, the 
past shows us, in secular history, engraved 
on monuments and inscribed in brick and 
block and parchment, the universal prac- 
tice of sacrifice to Deity and continuing in 
the inherited customs of backward peoples 
still alive. It is a custom inseparably con- 
nected with human life as the past reveals 
it. But with the New Testament history 
the past advances a still more significant 
fact — that, within fifty years from Calvary, 
considered for the moment as simply the 
place of a Roman execution, the ancient 
Hebrew commonwealth was dead forever, 
its sacrificial system forever passed away; 
and wherever the story of Calvary, and the 
interpretation of it which the New Testa- 


26 


THE OLD FAITH 


ment writings make, have gone, there also, 
whatever may have been the sacrificial rites 
and customs, they too have perished. One 
other fact the past, in this connection, 
makes very plain — that while with Calvary 
sacrifices for sin ceased, wherever they have 
thus ceased the sense of sin has grown 
immeasurably more real and personally 
poignant. 

Added to its service as supplying thus 
the facts and experiences by which we inter- 
pret our own, the past is preeminently influ- 
ential in our present religion because of the 
vindication it furnishes of the religious 
ideas it has bequeathed us. “What makes 
any part of history great,” writes George 
A. Gordon, “is the revelation it contains of 
the moral worth of man. To look upon 
that revelation,” he continues, “it is not 
necessary to confine attention to religious 
history.” 1 Here is the lengthening influ- 
ence of the past upon our modern religion 
and religious life. It lays upon us the con- 
straint of the increasing moral worth of 
man as it shows us the great adventures of 


1 Witness to Immortality, p. 277. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


27 


the spirit in which, from age to age, he has 
participated. Every event in the unfold- 
ing of that moral worth has been a link in 
the chain which binds us to the centuries 
which have fled. What mighty deeds have 
gone to that unfolding! Through what 
emergencies of strength and sorrow, of 
pain and pasion, men have passed in the 
long career of their victorious spiritual 
advance! It has been said above, that the 
truths of religion are the forces of history. 
In what fierce and splendid enterprises we 
see these truths as we look back upon the 
past of which too often we are impatient! 
They gleam from the twilights of all classic 
peoples and are terribly revealed in flames 
and blood at the beginning of our Christian 
era. They shine through the murk and 
mist of the empire of Constantine, through 
the black night of the Papal Church with 
its unspeakable enterprises of filth and 
crime. They have been proven and prop- 
agated by the fires of the martyrs and the 
agonies of the Inquisition. They have been 
demonstrated in huts and discovered on 
thrones. They have been witnessed by the 


28 


THE OLD FAITH 


fortitude of Puritans and the fervor of 
Wesley ans. They have leavened com- 
merce and liberated slaves and softened 
war. They look out upon to-day from the 
windows of schools and colleges, hospitals 
and halls of legislation. “We are in- 
debted, ’’ says Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, “to 
the men and women who have wisely 
handled our yesterdays .” 1 They have 
wrought out the victory of the religious 
ideas we have acquired and in their expe- 
riences, passionate and tragic, have empow- 
ered the truths which are the very heart of 
the religion of to-day. 

Any honest inventory of the religion of 
to-day must, therefore, acknowledge an 
immeasurable debt to the days that have 
gone. “The notion that the past may be 
ignored and forgotten is a sure recipe for 
spiritual smallness.” 2 And the greatness 
of our debt to it and the graciousness of 
its influence upon us are felt with singular 
weight when we take account of the great 
characters of the past with which the his- 


1 Religious Use of Memory, p. 10. 

2 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 109. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


29 


tory of religion and religious thinking is 
concerned. “The greatest needs of us all,” 
Henry Churchill King has said, “are the 
contagion of high and significant person- 
alities, and the opportunity of sharing in 
their best visions.” 1 And this is true, and 
the influence of these high and significant 
personalities is powerful and beneficent, 
irrespective of our agreement with their 
particular interpretations of truth or 
theories of life. Interpretations and the- 
ories may have only transient value; they 
may be constructive and profitable for a 
year or a century, and then be outgrown; 
but the world never outgrows a great char- 
acter. Dante’s theology is long since dead, 
but Dante is a living force to-day. We can 
look back with amazement and something 
of horror at the logical and pitiless conclu- 
sions of Calvinism, but we can regard Cal- 
vin with nothing less than abiding rever- 
ence and honor. We can do very well to- 
day without the particular type of mind 
and conception of the Scriptures which 
John Bunyan had, but we can never get 


1 Religion as Life, p. 105. 


30 


THE OLD FAITH 


along without John Buny an himself. “The 
first requisites of religion and civilization,” 
says George Adam Smith, “are outstand- 
ing characters.” 1 There are some signifi- 
cant personalities whose influence is so 
definitely incarnate in the work they 
wrought, the discoveries they made, the 
readjustment of ideas they compelled, that 
their value to the world is irrespective of 
their personal characters. Such a man was 
Charles Darwin. But there are these 
others, whose contributions to religious 
thought and life, vast and definite as they 
may be, are utterly dependent on their per- 
sonalities. It may be at first thought diffi- 
cult, or even impossible, to define in concise 
statements the influence these characters 
have brought and still bring to our latest 
religious life, but one has only to name their 
names to realize the impoverishment which 
would follow if they could be struck from 
off the record of the past. What would be 
the condition of religion to-day without the 
life and influence of Luther or Zwingli or 
Knox? Take away the influence of Wesley 


1 Isaiah, Vol. I, p. 251. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


31 


and Whitefield, of George Fox and Bishop 
Rutherford; or, coming even to our later 
generation, take away the character and 
influence of Channing and Parker and 
Robertson, of Dale and Beecher, and how 
impoverished whatever religion we would 
have would doubtless be! The truth here 
has been eloquently expressed by Dr. 
Marineau: “The glorious persons of human 
history, imperishable from the traditions 
of every civilized people, keeping their 
sublime glance upon the Conscience of 
ages, create the unity of the faith.” 

There are those who insist that we must 
remake our religion, reconstruct our reli- 
gious ideas, revolutionize our theology. 
They have the attitude of men who would 
rebuild a house, or remold some metal fig- 
ure; as if religion were some malleable sub- 
stance of the mind to be handled in any 
fashion the vagrant will of men may work. 
Religion is nothing of the kind. “Religion 
from one point of view is as firm as the ever- 
lasting hills; from another point of view it 
is as pliant and flexible as water, which flows 
freely into every place and fills every 


32 


THE OLD FAITH 


vessel, no matter what its form may be.” 1 
We need to realize the firmness as well as 
the pliancy. Like life itself, which, indeed, 
it is, religion is growth; a coordination of 
thought, conduct, experience, and hope, 
developing with the development of human 
interest. It can be directed here, restrained 
there, enriched in this fashion, protected in 
that; its wild growths may be cut off, its 
temporal or local excrescences removed, its 
defects remedied. But as long as it is alive 
for living men it cannot be arbitrarily 
shaped to the passing moods of any age 
without regard for the life and experiences 
of the mighty past. To revert to a former 
figure, these great characters of years gone 
by have been husbandmen ; they have 
pruned and protected; they have developed 
its neglected branches, they have fed the 
withering roots, they have revived its parch- 
ing foliage, they have fertilized its hostile 
soil, they have built around it mighty bar- 
riers of devotion and apology to defend it 
from the storms of ignorance and the 
assaults of evil; while, of all the glorious 


1 William Boyd Carpenter: The Witness to the Influence of Christ, p. 132. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


33 


persons of the past who keep their sublime 
glance upon the conscience of the ages, 
“serenest of the progeny of God” is He, of 
whom something will be said in the pages 
which are to follow, for whom are all things 
and through whom are all things, and who, 
for all the expanding knowledge and 
heightening powers of men, is yet 

The fountain light of all our day, 

The master light of all our seeing. 



II 

THE MODERN INCREMENT 


No other century that we are able to survey 
was so full of such glaring contradictions and such 
sudden changes, as the nineteenth; the period 
which commenced about the eightieth year of 
the eighteenth century and has just closed. In 
it revolution and reaction followed one another 
in the quickest succession, and, while the masses 
sank deeper and deeper into Materialism, Atheism, 
and even Anarchism, Orthodoxy and Ecclesiasticism 
reached a height of development scarcely con- 
ceivable at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 

During the century this division and inner con- 
fusion permeated increasingly the public life of 
the people: all were engaged in conflict to obtain 
the best for the satisfaction of life’s needs. The 
innermost personal life of men became chaotic, 
and swayed restlessly, often with sudden revolu- 
tion, from the spirit of the Enlightenment to that 
of the Romantic Reaction; from an optimism, 
happy in the enjoyment of civilization, to a wear- 
iness of life so great as to make men desire death. — 
Weinel and Widgery : Jesus in the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury and After, p. 32f. 


CHAPTER II 

THE MODERN INCREMENT 

Out of this colossal past, religion, with 
its everlasting firmness and its sinuous flex- 
ibility, poured into the social and intellec- 
tual ferment of the recent generation. To 
the multitudinous changes wrought in 
knowledge and experience during the past 
century, and particularly in recent years, 
it could not be indifferent. As all the 
events of humanity have gone to form it in 
the past, so all the events of humanity to- 
day have their bearing on its present. “For 
us,” wrote Brierly, “to make us spiritually, 
were the first beginnings of thought, the 
making of alphabets, the making of liter- 
atures, the struggles of patriots, the death 
of martyrs, the creations of genius, the re- 
rearches of science, the whole age-long 
struggle of the world.” 1 It is a truth not 
of the past tense only. The practice as well 

1 J. Brierly: Religion and To-day, p. 135. 

37 


38 


THE OLD FAITH 


as the beginnings of thought, the use as 
well as the makings of alphabets and litera- 
tures, the present as well as the past 
struggle of the world is making us spirit- 
ually. The age has its increment as well as 
its inheritance. The rapid and remarkable 
changes in thought, life, knowledge, and 
activity profoundly affect our reception 
and consideration of the religion which the 
past has bequeathed us. President Harris, 
of Amherst College, put the truth not too 
strongly when he said, a few years ago, 
that the Protestant Reformation itself did 
not work a greater change than the last 
quarter of a century has marked in reli- 
gious thought, belief, and life. 1 

Two influences may be discerned in these 
changes. The first is the influence of 
science. The application of new knowl- 
edge to machinery is visible on every side, 
but the scientific achievements of our age 
are far more extensive than mere mechan- 
ism will show. The astronomer of our gen- 
eration not only weighs and measures stars 
so distant that light traveling 186,000 miles 


1 Quoted by Henry Churchill King: Religion as Life, p. 116. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


39 


a second takes years to reach us, but he tests 
their chemical composition and analyzes 
their substance as if he held their dust 
within his hand. At the other extreme is 
the modern physicist dealing with specks of 
matter many times invisible to the naked 
eye. He analyzes one of these specks, to 
quote a leading scientist of the day, “into 
billions of molecules ; and dissects each 
molecule into its component atoms ; and 
each atom into a miniature planetary sys- 
tem of perhaps eighteen hundred elec- 
trons.” Then, to continue the quotation, 
he “measures these unthinkably minute 
units of matter; weighs them; tests the 
speed of their flight and the quantity 
and quality of the electric charge they 
bear.” 1 

To go no farther into the various scien- 
tific activities, but to speak of the funda- 
mental discovery which has most affected 
modern thought and life, the theory of evo- 
lution has utterly altered our outlook on 
the world and truth. That theory is now so 
widely known in its general outline and so 

i Williams: Miracles of Science, p. 2. 


40 


THE OLD FAITH 


thoroughly accepted that it needs no 
explanation here. Though evolutionists 
differ among themselves as to the way in 
which evolution proceeds, the fundamental 
theory is an axiom of modern thought. Its 
author, Charles Darwin, as S. Parkes Cad- 
man, in his Brooklyn Institute lectures in 
1910, said, “created a revolution which has 
had no equal in the intellectual history of 
the modern world, since the Renaissance 
and the Reformation.” 1 “Each age,” 
another suggestive thinker has written, “is 
confronted with new conditions, but our 
age is confronted with a new universe.” 2 
Early in the day of this modern science it 
came sheerly into conflict with religion. Be- 
cause the evidence religion offered for its 
characteristic conclusions was not of the kind 
and quality with which science must neces- 
sarily deal, science presumed to throw reli- 
gion out of court. Because the first chap- 
ters of Genesis did not coincide verbally 
with the precise geological history of the 
globe, science would tell us that the entire 


1 Charles Darwin and Other English Thinkers, p. 42. 

2 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 112. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


41 


Bible was unbelievable. Because the solar 
system of the patriarchs and the psalmists 
and Saint Paul did not tally with the the- 
ory of Copernicus and the discoveries of 
modern solar photography, therefore in- 
spiration was a cunningly devised fable. 
Because biology and Darwinism did not 
confirm the biblical account of the creation 
of animal life, therefore the whole structure 
of religious thinking must come down. 
Because the New Testament miracles 
seemed to contravene the laws which natural 
scientists had discovered but could not 
explain, therefore the New Testament had 
forfeited its usefulness and Christianity was 
an exploded hallucination. That was the 
first challenge of modern science. 

At the same time a second influence was 
operative on the age in which these changes 
were taking place — the influence of demo- 
cracy. Eighteen years ago Lord Rose- 
bery as he entered upon the office of prime 
minister of England said: “I believe that 
the people are now inclined to think that 
politics is not merely a game in which the 
pawns have to be sacrificed to the knights 


42 


THE OLD FAITH 


and the castles, but is an elevating and en- 
nobling effort to carry into . . . practical 
life the principles of a higher morality. 
. . . I am certain that there is a party in 
this country not named as yet, . . . which is 
inclined to say: ‘A plague on both your 
Houses, a plague on all your parties, a 
plague on all your politics, a plague on all 
your unending discussions, which yield so 
little fruit. Have done with this unending 
talk and come down and do something for 
the people.’ ” 1 That is the voice of democ- 
racy. It had spoken before, for few indeed 
have been the periods of human history in 
which some voice of appeal for the greater 
social good was not raised. “Come down 
and do something for the people!” That 
was the meaning of the barons beating up 
around King John at Runnymede, and of 
the Puritans sadly, but without flinching, 
bringing Charles to the block, and of those 
whirlwind days that stormed around the 
Tuileries and guillotined a Louis and an 
Antoinette and drenched the streets of 


1 Quoted by Freeman tie: The World as Subject of Redemption, page 
xv. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


43 


Paris in the blood of Bourbon nobles. It 
was that spirit which beat back Spain from 
Holland and for eighty years piled up the 
heroisms of the Dutch republic; that spirit 
which hurried James the Second into flight, 
turned a tax on tea into an American Revo- 
lution, and shattered the sham empire of 
the third Napoleon. It was not altogether 
a new spirit when Lord Rosebery uttered 
it, but never did it speak so clearly and 
meet so hearty a response as it does to-day. 

To-day the democratic spirit is vitaliz- 
ing, as never before, all the social ideals 
and institutions of our American life. In 
the political life of our times it is more 
effective and insistent than ever. Govern- 
ment in the republic used to be a matter 
confined to a comparatively few individ- 
uals, and one of the more instructive spec- 
tacles of the day is the survival of here and 
there a man of large affairs holding tena- 
ciously to the ancient principle that the 
great body of the people are incompetent 
of self-government. To cite but two recent 
achievements in this movement toward 
complete self-government, the substitution, 


44 


THE OLD FAITH 


in many States, of the primary nomination 
for the convention method of determining 
candidates for public office, and the amend- 
ment to the constitution providing for the 
election of United States senators by direct 
vote of the people instead of by their repre- 
sentatives in State legislatures, are indi- 
cations of the direction in which we are 
traveling. But they are only indications. 
Government is becoming more and more a 
matter not of parties but of citizens. It 
has come to deal more and more not only 
with broad federal issues such as the tariff 
and the currency, but with child labor and 
employers’ liability and the like. It con- 
ceives its function to be not a business of 
partisan supremacy only, but an oppor- 
tunity of popular benefit. It establishes 
the parcel post and saves the public from 
the exorbitant charges of the private ex- 
press companies; it inspects food and 
drugs, takes oversight and regulation of 
manufactory and labor, interests itself in 
the conditions in which miners, seamen, and 
mill operatives live and work. It studies 
the conditions of country life with a view to 


IN THE NEW DAY 


45 


reviving the attractiveness of the farm. It 
becomes a general counselor to the farmer, 
fruit-grower, and stockman, analyzing the 
soil, battling with disease and insect pests, 
laying before any man who wishes it the 
result of expert experiment and knowledge 
in the realm of his particular interests. It 
protects game birds and song birds and 
animals, patrols the thinning forests, re- 
stocks the depleted waters, and fights, with 
all the adjuncts of modern science, the 
enemies of useful plant and animal life. 
Through its consular offices and special 
agents it carries on a world-wide scrutiny 
of commercial and industrial conditions, so 
that the manufacturer and exporter may 
best be served. State and city governments 
project the movement further. They have 
boards of health and of public help, factory 
inspection and housing commissions, public 
hospitals and dispensaries, open-air sani- 
toriums, and municipal and State farms for 
the reclamation of the incorrigible youth — 
a score of activities issuing in the safety, 
comfort, and prosperity of the general 
public. Much yet is to be and will be done. 


46 


THE OLD FAITH 


The just coordination of capital and labor 
has not been accomplished; the courts are 
too far removed from sympathy with and 
accessibility by the average man and the 
very poor; the will of the people is too 
easily subverted from its social aim. But 
the spirit of democracy, the come-down- 
and-do-something-for-the-people spirit, is 
pushing slowly on to the more complete 
socializing of government and life. 

It was inevitable that religion should feel 
the effect of this democratic spirit, for the 
life of society invariably reflects itself in 
the conduct of religion. Now, no charge 
is more frequently made against our gen- 
eration than that it is irreligious. Again 
and again its godlessness is emphasized; 
and the unhappy feature of the charge is 
the readiness with which substantiating evi- 
dence can be found. The lengthening of 
the labor week, under the alleged pressure 
of commercial necessities, so that thousands 
of men and women have no Sabbath; the 
dreariness and monotony of the lives of 
many toilers driven by the pitiless regime 
of modern machinery and piecework; the 


IN THE NEW DAY 


47 


intensifying of the craving for recreation 
and the multiplying of cheap amusements; 
the breakdown, under physical weariness 
on the one hand and religious indifference 
on the other, of the sanctity of the first day 
of the week; the deepening chasm between 
whole segments of society and industry 
and the institutions of religion ; the develop- 
ment of labor organizations into solidly knit 
industrial groups openly hostile to the 
present social order and often virulent in 
denunciation of the Church identified with 
it — all of these are too actual to be ignored. 
And in the tempers, tastes, and habits of 
the more comfortable members of society, 
as well, there are easily discerned tend- 
encies and activities pagan in kind and 
issue. The old simplicity of life, the old 
reverence for religion and the Church, the 
old authority of the pulpit and the altar, the 
old sanctity of creed and confession, all 
have either gone or shrunken to poor 
shadows of their former plenitude. 

In the very midst of these conditions, 
however, a certain curious fact is to be 
noted — that religious considerations were 


48 


THE OLD FAITH 


never so widely exploited as to-day. Maga- 
zines devote an immense amount of space 
to reports and discussions of multifarious 
phases of religious activity and thought; 
novels, more numerously than ever, have a 
religious question at the core, and some of 
the most popular and appealing plays are 
dramatic expositions of some form or phase 
of religious theory. So that, as the presi- 
dent of Brown University has written, 
“There is more religious aspiration abroad in 
our land to-day than ever before, more hearty 
response to the setting forth of Christian 
standards of action, more sincere desire to 
translate the life of Christ into the life of 
the struggling world .” 1 What has hap- 
pened, what is happening, that this appar- 
ent irreligious spirit and this almost pas- 
sionate interest in religion should prevail 
side by side? The answer can be put in 
the words of Shailer Mathews: “Democ- 
racy is stretching over into religion .” 2 
And whatever may he the final result, this 
much is certain; the forms in which religion 


1 Faunce: What Does Christianity Mean? p. 143. 

2 The Church and the Changing Order, p. 162. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


49 


must be expressed, the standards by which 
it is to be judged, the manner of appeal it 
makes and the kind of authority it is to 
exercise, are being altered almost to the 
measure of a revolution. 

No man seriously concerned with life 
dare ignore these modern influences and 
the changes they have made and make upon 
the religious thought and life of our gen- 
eration. The discoveries of modern science 
in the minds and persons of patient, sin- 
cere, and gifted men are not lightly to be 
neglected; and whether we consent or not, 
the new type of social thinking, the grow- 
ing spirit of democracy, compels us to 
diverge widely from the religious forms and 
applications which our fathers found suffi- 
cient. How is the faith itself affected? 
And how shall we conceive it after admit- 
ting all the influences of the widening 
knowledge and the social spirit of this new 
and challenging era? How does the old 
faith stand in the new day? 

(1) What, in the first place, is the result 
of modern science on the truths of religion 
we have to preach? 


50 


THE OLD FAITH 


As a sort of preliminary to the main dis- 
cussion at this point, it is to be remarked 
that there are two dominant elements in the 
scientific spirit, for the discipline of which 
religious thinking may well be grateful. 
They are its passion for accuracy and its 
reverence for law. It will have no guesses 
unsupported by a reasonable array of facts. 
It announces a theory of natural selection, 
or of the divisibility of the atom, or the 
planetary nature of the electron, but not 
until a thousand observations and experi- 
ments have given ample ground for the 
hypothesis. This is in vast contrast with 
that type of religious thinking which an- 
nounces unblushingly the whole plan of 
God and can delineate the aspects and 
activities of the eternal life after the manner 
of a census report. Then, too, it discovers 
the immutable laws of nature, discerns the 
orderly procession of cosmic events, appre- 
hends the logic of history, and refuses to 
double in its tracks after the fashion of 
many a sermon and religious treatise which 
vindicate the realities of the spirit only by 
utter disregard of all the continuities of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


51 


premise and conclusion. This passion for 
accuracy and reverence for law seemed at 
first to seal the doom of religion, resting, 
as it does, on foundations often beyond the 
reach of any of the instruments and proc- 
esses of exact science. But side by side 
with them is the significant fact that in the 
most rigid statements of natural law and 
the most compelling theories deduced from 
its discovered facts, statements and theories 
on which it builds its proudest structures, 
there is a vast element of unprovable as- 
sumption. 

Science, to refer to the illustration used 
a moment ago, claims to separate a speck 
of matter invisible to the naked eye into 
billions of molecules, divide the molecule 
into atoms, and then find eighteen hundred 
electrons in the single atom, moving in a 
complete planetary system. The wildest 
credulity of religion never equaled that 
brave hypothesis. The first result of this 
discovery of the suppositions of science is 
to show that as long as science permits 
assumption to have so large a place in its 
interpretation of the universe it cannot for- 


52 


THE OLD FAITH 


bid our moral and religious assumptions to 
have part in determining our conceptions 
of the universe. In other words, the first 
and most significant, perhaps, of the results 
of the new science upon religion has been 
to vindicate the place which religion has 
claimed for intelligent faith. So much in 
general; now to speak of particulars. 

“In the beginning,” are the first words 
of the Bible, “God created,” and the nar- 
rative goes on to describe the making of 
the world and all that is in it in a series of 
completed events. “And God . . . rested 
from all his work which God had created 
and made.” And for centuries Bible-read- 
ing humanity believed that the work was all 
done then ; everything made, and made 
once for all. To-day Professor DeVries, of 
Amsterdam, has developed twelve different 
races of evening primroses from a common 
stock, a Professor Morgan has subjected 
the eggs of a certain fly to the influence of 
radium and has produced a separate species 
which breeds true; while, to pass by other 
and equally striking results, Luther Bur- 
bank has amazed the world with the crea- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


53 


tions he has accomplished. He has crossed 
a Japanese and an American plum and pro- 
duced the fruit which revolutionized the 
prune industry; he has made a new fruit, 
the plumcot, out of the plum and the apri- 
cot, and it breeds true. He has made three 
kinds of poppies from a single parent stock, 
and combined three kinds of daisies to make 
the Shasta which would rank as an individ- 
ual species, if found wild. He has pro- 
duced plums without seeds and cherries for 
canning that leave the stone on the tree 
when the cherries are pulled. He has de- 
veloped a white blackberry and a spineless 
cactus which reproduce themselves. The 
normal walnut tree requires eighteen or 
twenty years before it begins to bear nuts 
profitably. He has produced a walnut tree 
which reproduces itself naturally, and 
which bears nuts profitably at eighteen 
months. In 1884 there died a priest in an 
obscure monastery in Silesia who discov- 
ered a law, known by his name as Mendel’s 
law, by which specific qualities of plant and 
animal can be reproduced accurately 
according to the will of the experimenter — 


54 


THE OLD FAITH 


a discovery which has already wrought the 
most astounding improvements in both 
plant and stock-raising. Turning away 
from the earth, the new science, looking 
through the glass of the astronomer, tells 
us that it sees worlds in the making. It 
sees here star shattering against star and so 
disintegrating into dust of stars, and these 
particles falling together to form another 
star, the process of change and growth and 
life and death endlessly going on in spaces 
so immense the mind of man cannot imag- 
ine them. The geologist assures us that 
there are constant changes taking place 
in the earth on which we live, new stone 
forming, old stone crumbling into dust, the 
granite crest of the forbidding mountain 
melting surely into the soil from which the 
flowers of the valley spring, and the slime 
and clay of buried swamps becoming the 
solid rock on which a city rests. Science 
knows nothing of a creative force which 
made all things and then rested; it knows 
a creation which is proceeding without end; 
and when it speaks of a God, speaks of one, 
not who created all things, but who is creat- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


55 


ing things. Does that contradict Genesis? 
Only to very arbitrary minds. The nar- 
rative of Genesis is a story of the sublime 
fact of God making a world. And the book 
of science is the story of God making a 
world; the vital fact is in each narrative the 
same. Science adds simply another chapter 
and describes not a creation without God, 
but the process God employs. The truths 
of religion remain, regardless of the process 
which it has discerned; but the appeal of 
religion itself is mightily reenforced by the 
description science gives. 

For science has revealed to us a growing 
universe. In a vaster fashion than the 
apostle meant it is true that God is not 
the God of the dead but of the living. Step 
by step strength and beauty of form and 
feature have developed; stage by stage the 
adaptability for use; age by age the keen- 
ness of sight and power of reason; century 
by century the constraint of moral con- 
sciousness. In every realm of life, phys- 
ical nature, mental range, social habit, reli- 
gious aspiration, the results have been not 
a manufacture but a growth. Thought, 


56 


THE OLD FAITH 


industry, worship, faith, sacrifice, mar- 
riage, government, law, all have grown, 
and grown, and grown; the whole world of 
life is progress, and progress betterward. 
What does that mean for religion to-day? 
Three great conceptions. 

First, that in a living universe, growing 
betterward, moral good which in a human 
world is the supremely fit, must go on to 
its complete victory and vindication; and 
one has only to turn to history to see the 
life of human society corroborate the 
conclusions of scientific investigation and 
theory. Not only in volumes like Lecky’s 
History of European Morals, and Loring’s 
Gesta Christi, but in the general history of 
humankind written without moral bias, the 
slow, perhaps, but undefeated growth of 
moral ideal, experience, standards, and con- 
duct is unmistakably written. Religion 
which, in the days when moral concerns 
were most embattled and the nights when 
atheism lay heaviest on the human spirit, 
dared to affirm the victory of righteousness 
and the certainty of spiritual realities and 


IN THE NEW DAY 


57 


their unfolding, finds now its greatest ally 
in the very force which, half a century ago, 
was feared as its greatest enemy. 

Then, without intending it, science, with 
its revelation of a growing universe and a 
continuous creative activity, has shattered 
the old philosophical denials of the reason- 
ableness of the incarnation of God in Christ. 
The incarnation is no longer unbelievable 
by scientific minds. Unbelief has written 
its volumes on the Christ-Myth and its 
description of the pagan Christs, and 
thought to end the business. But read in 
the light of the science of to-day these books 
are so much more reenforcement of the 
faith. They emphasize anew the truth of 
nature continually moving on and up in a 
ceaseless quest for higher forms. A thinker 
like Bergson, without the vision of Christ, 
delineates the vital impulse pushing out in 
new developments and creations, till the 
Christian mind recognizes in it all God 
toiling under the beneficent bondage of 
law, which is but the report of the divine 
method, making a world of nature and men. 


58 


THE OLD FAITH 


Here and there in various realms, new 
and better individuals appear, prophets of 
kindred life which ultimately follows. And 
these pagan Christs, Christ-Myths, and the 
like, also witness to the inextinguishable 
quest of humanity itself for the highest; they 
testify the passion of the world for the god- 
like man; they illustrate the moving spirit 
in humanity, passionately insisting on that 
which is not; “the earnest expectation of 
the creation waiteth for the revealing of 
the sons of God.” In line with all this, 
in a growing universe, where nature and 
humanity alike are growing betterward, 
and questing for still nobler issues, Christ 
may well be not simply the isolated miracle 
religion has always proclaimed, but even 
more. Christ may well be the first fruits, 
not alone of them that sleep, but of this 
stupendous process of a creating God now 
going on, the end of which shall not be 
realized “till we all attain unto the unity 
of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto 
the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of Christ.” 


IN THE NEW DAY 


59 


So too the science of to-day has made 
a place — the matter is beyond its realm, 
though it does argue the point — for reli- 
gion’s fundamental contention, the saving 
power of the cross of Christ and the atone- 
ment. While we can no longer think of 
God as an angry tyrant — though the wrath 
of God has vast and wholesome meaning — 
who must be appeased by the death of Jesus 
as a quantitative substitute for the death 
of all the race; and while the new science 
shows us the evolutionary process — individ- 
uals and species developing as they are 
best suited to endure the conditions of life — 
it does not show us that surviving which is 
in itself the best according to our highest 
human values. The weed crowds out the 
wheat; brambles choke the berries; the 
animals more useful in a world of human 
interests die out amid conditions of food 
supply and climate where wild beasts easily 
multiply. We have no promise in the evo- 
lutionary process alone for the ultimate 
victory of moral good, or even the humanly 
useful. It takes a Burbank to make a 
Shasta daisy and tame the cactus to a 


60 


THE OLD FAITH 


food plant. The evolutionary principle 
plus the recombining power of a govern- 
ing mind results in the continuous per- 
fecting of individuals and species. And 
this is in the realm of nature the principle 
announced by religion in the realm of 
spirit. Though Burbank is not outside the 
unmeasured series of evolutionary develop- 
ment, but represents its highest achieve- 
ment, the production of humankind, he, by 
an interference with the normal course, 
works within the laws, what to one who 
was unfamiliar with the natural process 
would be miracles of perfected nature. So 
Christ, born of a woman, stands at the head 
of all humankind, God incarnate, the 
highest upreach of the lift of life ; and by a 
mystery we cannot penetrate, as the 
Shasta daisy cannot fathom the forces that 
have made it great, and as we cannot under- 
stand the powers of nature we so readily 
enjoy, by the mystery of the cross and all 
that centuries of human experience have 
meant by atonement, he has given to the 
onward march of life a supreme and reor- 
ganizing movement, whereby, in the words 


IN THE NEW DAY 


61 


of religion, “if any man is in Christ Jesus, 
he is a new creature.” And science, which 
some of us have so greatly feared, has be- 
come like another disciple, kneeling to say 
to the vindicated Christ, “My Lord, and my 
God.” 

Amid many questions crowding for con- 
sideration here there are for us only two: 
What, then, about retribution and reward? 
What has science, in other words, to say 
about hell and heaven? 

Let us admit at once that the hell of 
Calvinism, with God torturing sinners over 
the fires as cruel boys hold flies on pins above 
a lamp, as Jonathan Edwards illustrated 
it, is now out of the question. The old 
theological idea that sin, because it is com- 
mitted against an Infinite Being, is itself 
infinite and must be infinitely punished, is 
no longer possible. It would be of a piece 
with supposing, as John Brierly has said, 
that “a child’s punishment for its offenses 
is to be proportionate to the superior wis- 
dom, strength, and station of its parent.” 1 
What conception of sin, then, have we left? 


1 Religion and To-day, p. 34. 


62 


THE OLD FAITH 


Evolution has been read to mean that sin is 
a fall upward: that “there are no shadows 
where there is no light” ; that eventually the 
race will have sloughed off all moral evil; 
and so punishment for sin is not to be 
thought of. 

Furthermore, the personal and individ- 
ual evil that is visible and effective now is 
largely the result of inheritance; the lust- 
ful reaping the sin of forgotten ancestors, 
the criminal showing the flower of seeds 
sown in his blood by progenitors long since 
dead. And adding to the irresponsibility 
of the evildoer are the complex influences 
of surroundings. All of this may be true, 
though, of course, the fact of personal and 
willful wrongdoing is too widespread a 
matter of observation and experience to be 
ignored in any such fashion. But the 
biography of an evil does not settle the 
question of its results. Knowing how sin 
came to be does not alter the fact that it is 
here. However it may have originated, the 
effects are very bitter now. 

Of the terrible constraints of heredity, 


IN THE NEW DAY 


63 


science has proofs enough. Without illus- 
trating further, consider the summary of 
one notorious family, that of the celebrated 
Max Jukes, a descendant of the early 
Dutch settlers of New York. He had two 
sons who married half-sisters. In 1877 the 
history of 540 of the descendants had been 
traced and that of most of the others was 
accurately known. One third of them had 
died in infancy; 310 were paupers who 
spent a total of 2,300 years in almshouses; 
440 were physical wrecks; more than one 
half of the female descendants were prosti- 
tutes; 130 of the descendants were con- 
victed criminals, 7 of them being murderers ; 
only 20 learned trades and of these, 10 
learned in state prisons. Up to 1877 this 
one family had cost the state of New York 
more than $1,250,000 and the expense is 
still going on. 

Side by side with the sordid record of 
the Jukes family read the story of the 
family of Jonathan Edwards. In 1900 
1,394 of his descendants had been identi- 
fied. Of them, 295 were college graduates, 
13 presidents of colleges, besides many 


64 


THE OLD FAITH 


principals of similar institutions; more than 
100 were clergymen, missionaries, or theo- 
logical professors; 75 were officers in the 
army apd riavy ; 60 were prominent authors 
and writers, having produced 135 important 
books and editing 18 publications; 60 were 
physicians; 100 and more were lawyers, one 
of them our most eminent professor of law; 
30 were judges, 80 held public office, one 
being Vice-President of the United States; 
3 were United States senators, others being 
governors, members of Congress, mayors of 
cities and ministers to foreign courts; one 
was president of the Pacific Mail Steamship 
Company, and others prominent in business 
and banking circles; while it is not known 
that any was ever convicted of crime! 1 

It looks like a clear case against any doc- 
trine of penalty. But two facts are yet to 
be noted. First, that side by side with this 
record of inherited and continuous evil you 
have the innumerable narratives of men 
and women born in sin and reared in 
damning environments, with criminality 
and lust and pauperism in their blood, and 


1 Cf. Herbert Walter: Genetics, p. 227f. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


65 


evil in their associations and outlook; but 
who, by the power of God, have t>ecome 
men and women of amazing graciousness 
and goodness of character and life. The 
story of our great city missions, of London’s 
halls, of Water Street and Hadley Hall in 
New York, and the Salvation Army bar- 
racks made popular by Harold Begbie, the 
story of foreign missions and the uncounted 
altars of Christian churches everywhere, is 
a triumphant romance of the possibilities 
of changed life. 

And the second fact to be remarked here 
is that notwithstanding the constraints of 
heredity and the evil born in the blood, not- 
withstanding all theories of a fall upward, 
there remains, insistent and inexorable, 
the sense of obligation and responsibility. 
However men may have become what they 
are, they know they are not what they ought 
to be; and if there is no story of sin save 
that of a guiltless inheritance of unavoid- 
able defects, then science shows us nature 
producing at one and the same time an 
utterly inconsistent and useless feeling of 
responsibility for it. 


66 


THE OLD FAITH 


Science has not a word to speak specifi- 
cally on the reality of hell; it lays before you 
the inexorable facts of human character and 
its silence is an inevitable and searching ques- 
tion. Can there be a just moral order which 
would ignore all moral distinctions between 
these two families? Does not the simple fact 
of heredity and its impressive laws, argue for 
differences in the immortal life correspond- 
ing to the moral differences in the mortal 
life? When a soul knows no moral changes, 
when it comes to the end of its earthty day 
stained and evil; when under the influence 
of heredity and its impressive laws argue for 
and of an environment in which it acqui- 
esced; or when by deliberate or reckless 
revolt against recognized moral good it 
comes to the journey’s earthly ending, is 
not the witness of science to the fact that 
the inevitable issue is a condition of expe- 
rience appropriate to the character thus 
formed and finished, not punishment in the 
old sense of retribution, but the harvest of 
life? What kind of a life hereafter could 
the Jukeses live? What can there be in the 
next life for a soul that is shrunken and 


IN THE NEW DAY 


67 


selfish and lustful and identified with sin? 
Throw away every notion of punishment, 
and the best you can get is what John heard 
from open heavens: “He that is unright- 
eous, let him do unrighteousness still, and 
he that is filthy let him be made filthy 
still.” You may put out the fires of the 
old-fashioned hell in all the pleasant waters 
of new scriptural interpretations you 
please, but the profound reality of per- 
sonal character remains; and if there is no 
hell to which a soul may go, there is yet the 
more poignant hell which the soul itself 
may be. 

Reversing the terms, you get the argu- 
ment from the morally good. Science with 
its impressive reading of natural law, while 
not pushing it to the extreme, as Henry 
Drummond did in his notable volume, con- 
firms religion in its emphasis upon the 
unflinching spiritual law; and adds to the 
heaven of religious faith and hope the 
assurance of the most convincing reason. 

For here also the silence of science is as 
eloquent as its voice. It unveils many an 
ancient mystery and lays bare many a 


68 


THE OLD FAITH 


hidden process; it strips the supernatural 
from many a storied marvel and in place of 
miracle reveals the operation of calculable 
law. But some things it cannot explain. 
It has not told the origin of love, nor of the 
universal expectation of a life beyond, 
where those that love, and have lived 
according to their highest light, shall meet 
again and live forever. If this were the 
tradition of a single people, the fancy of a 
tribe, an expectation local to a continent or 
commensurate with a certain degree of cul- 
ture, it might be either explained or negli- 
gible. But it is the universal attitude, the 
race-wide expectation. Science shattering 
the Ptolemaic theory may have destroyed 
the older localizations of the immortal life, 
but the hope and certainty it has not 
touched. At the boundary of that realm 
it halts. It makes more reasonable than 
before the foundation-beliefs on which 
religion stands, and there, where religion 
leaps to its highest flight, it cannot say No. 
It may challenge the literalness of religion’s 
descriptions of the life that is to be; the fact 
enshrined in those descriptions it cannot 


IN THE NEW DAY 


69 


deny. And, made all the more clear and 
credible by the work which the scientific 
spirit has wrought in its scrutiny of the 
New Testament, greater, surer, as the years 
go by, stands One, for whom are all things 
and by whom are all things, saying, “I go 
to prepare a place for you . . . that where 
I am there ye may be also.” And not a 
word that cautious and credible science 
utters casts a shadow on the exalting hope 
of immortality, which for nineteen hundred 
years has made life more bearable and 
worthy, and death less dreadful and to be 
feared. 

(2) Turning, then, to the second influence 
which challenges our religious thinking to- 
day, what is the result of modern democ- 
racy on the ancient faith and our proclama- 
tion of it? The immediate answer is that 
modern democracy is transforming our 
theological conceptions. 

First of all, it is changing our idea of 
God. There is a sting of truth in the sneer 
of Feuerbach that man has made God in his 
own likeness. One can catch the reflection 
of theology as he looks into the political 


70 


THE OLD FAITH 


theories and institutions of humanity, for 
the theology of every age has comple- 
mented its prevailing political ideas. The 
sternness and remoteness of the God of the 
Middle Ages were a characteristic reflec- 
tion of the conception and practice of mon- 
archy. Given the obsession of the divine 
right of kings and the logical assumption 
of the temporal authority of the pope, with 
the corresponding feudal organization of 
society into lowering gradations of caste 
from baron to serf, and it is almost inevi- 
table that there shall come to pass the notion 
of a necessary series of mediators — priest 
and Mary and Christ — before the soul can 
lay its petition before the feet of God, and 
while this implacable and inaccessible sov- 
ereignty of God and even of Christ, as it 
was developed, can be derived from the 
Scriptures only by neglect of many and au- 
thoritative passages of completely modify- 
ing significance, yet that very neglect of 
modifying passages would be most natural 
to minds formed under the influence of 
mediaeval conceptions of society. Absolute 
monarchy was conceived to be the highest 


IN THE NEW DAY 


71 


and noblest expression of character and 
life, and the conception of God would 
inevitably take that form. Luther’s child- 
ish notion of Christ, that of a pitiless Judge, 
derived from the stained glass window of 
the village church, which pictured him as 
sitting on a rainbow with a flaming sword 
in his hand, was the ideal in which his whole 
generation and epoch lived. 

One cannot always prove which of two 
conceptions is primary, but it is more than 
debatable whether Calvin’s theology shaped 
his conception of government, or whether 
his inexorable theocratic ideas, born of his 
unflinching allegiance to Old Testament 
political forms, were not responsible for his 
stiff and pitiless doctrines of the sovereignty 
of God, and the immutable decrees. Puri- 
tanism was in a very real measure the 
advent of new political ideas and their 
influence stretching over into religion. The 
Puritan, says Macaulay, “prostrated him- 
self in the dust before his Maker, but he 
sets his foot on the neck of his king.” It 
was inevitable that Puritanism, when it 
had learned that society was greater than 


72 


THE OLD FAITH 


any sovereign, should discern, if slowly, 
that religion could do better things than 
prostrate itself in the dust before its Maker. 
And Puritanism, building a political com- 
monwealth on a new continent, built also 
the beginnings of a new conception of reli- 
gion. 

So too the theories of the atonement have 
felt the softening influence of the demo- 
cratic spirit. The theories of the atonement, 
of Christ’s death as the ransom paid to the 
devil for the rescue of the world, of Christ 
as a penal substitute, and the like, theories 
which have had vast and permanent value 
in the development of religious thinking 
and in the building of Christian society and 
life, are theories which could arise only 
under the protecting shadow of absolute 
monarchy. 

The Puritan however, in this connection, 
as he debased kingship exalted law; and 
instead of implicit and castelike submission 
to a monarch, developed an unrelieved sub- 
servience to a legal system. In theology 
the result was a theory of atonement which 
reproduced much of the arbitrariness of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


73 


the older conceptions; only instead of a 
devil to be bought off or an angry monarch 
to be appeased, it was a terrible and ma- 
jestic law which had to be upheld. The 
result to-day is that there is no theory 
of atonement to which any considerable 
body of thinkers can hold unqualified 
allegiance; and in the reaction from the 
forbidding and arbitrary doctrines of the 
past, the fact and doctrine of any atone- 
ment bade fair to be lost. However, evi- 
dences are not lacking now of a return to 
the substance of atonement, though a satis- 
fying theory is yet unformulated. Perhaps 
it will never be discerned or formulated, 
but, as ex-President Roosevelt has pointed 
out certain analogies between biological 
processes and the course of national history, 
our doctrines of theology must follow the 
analogies of social experience, or, in other 
words, be discovered from the spiritual and 
moral processes found operative in the life 
and activities of society. What is thus true 
of the doctrines of God and the atonement 
is true also of other and correlated doctrines 
— penalty, Providence, and the like; for, 


74 


THE OLD FAITH 


whatever may have been the forms in which 
the older generations cast their confessions 
of faith, the new day demands restatement 
of our creeds in terms of modern expe- 
rience. “No man’s theology,” says the Rev. 
George Jackson, in a sermon on “Char- 
acter and Creed,” “is safe that is not 
brought into constant contact with actual 
life.” 1 

There are at hand certain illustrations 
that this method of theological interpreta- 
tion is already in progress. Our new insis- 
tence on brotherhood ; our renewed emphasis 
upon the Fatherhood of God ; our recurrent 
use of the family as the type of ideal society 
and religious fellowship; our discernment 
of the social and economic as well as purely 
religious service and meaning of the historic 
Jesus; our imperative application to the 
immediate concerns and conditions of pres- 
ent day society of New Testament passages 
which were formerly considered wholly 
prophetic of the world to come, all indicate 
the increasing influence and result of the 
democratic spirit upon religious thinking. 


1 The Table Talk of Jesua, p. 75. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


75 


“Life,” as John Brierly has written, “is 
compelling us to revise our formulas.” 1 
As democracy has thus affected theology, 
so too it has influenced religious conduct. 
It has made religion not simply a matter 
of worship or formulated creed or sustain- 
ing personal hope, but a habit of life. It 
has brought religion out of the Church and 
the closet, out of individual experience 
itself, and made it coincident with all society. 
Religion used to be a private concern be- 
tween a man and his God. It is now an 
affair in which a man’s neighbor is included. 
“The only relationship big enough for any 
one man is all the rest of mankind.” 2 It 
used to be a matter of one’s personal con- 
science and conduct and transgression and 
salvation; it is now a matter also of one’s 
acquiescence or participation in the malad- 
justments of society. It used to be a 
refuge from a sense of individual guilt; 
now it is an impetus to social activity. We 
have learned that “a religion which merely 
consoles us for the wrongs we have done is 


1 Religion and To-day, p. 102. 

2 Bishop Brent, quoted by Roosevelt: History as Literature, p. 273. 


76 


THE OLD FAITH 


a menace to moral progress.” 1 And slowly, 
with stress and strain and not a little mis- 
understanding, democracy is driving reli- 
gion out to recognize in social injustices 
and limitations a responsibility and trans- 
gression, to right wrongs in which every 
individual shares, and to find its primary 
task, not in confessing social sins or reliev- 
ing social wants, but in ending the one and 
preventing the other. The spirit of democ- 
racy, however, is not simply a volatile and 
inaccessible atmosphere permeating and 
environing men and women in groups; it 
comes to power only through individuals. 
It is itself a personal matter. There has 
never been a reformation of any kind, a 
cleansing of politics, or curbing of tyranny, 
or humanizing of theology, or any other 
service accomplished for society or individ- 
uals wrought by democracy; whatever of 
the kind has been done at all has been done 
not by democracy but by democrats. So 
too the influence of democracy on religion 
has been an influence upon individual reli- 
gionists, and Christianity is changing its 


1 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 210. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


77 


social attitude and expression because indi- 
vidual Christians are being compelled to 
change their social attitude and expression. 
The manner of change can be indicated by 
three out of not a few possible illustrations. 

It is a change in the attitude of religion 
and the religious man toward the corporate 
task of society, or politics. There has been 
probably no more glaring contrast between 
ideals and actions than that between the 
Christian man’s creed and his political 
habits. There has never been a political 
evil in American life — the legalized exist- 
ence of the commerce in alcoholic drinks, 
the continuance of corrupt officials in power, 
the administration of municipal, State, and 
federal affairs for the benefit of public serv- 
ice and other corporations protected by fran- 
chise — not a single political evil but could 
have been prevented or ended at the will of 
the Christian voters. The Christian voters, 
however, heretofore have very largely 
refrained from voting or have voted as 
party and personal affiliations directed for 
the maintainance of the existing order. 
Some few have sincerely been so concerned 


78 


THE OLD FAITH 


in the things of the other world that they 
have honestly undervalued the things of 
this world, but the great majority have been 
governed by no such fine and positive spir- 
ituality. For the most part they have 
simply recognized no connection between 
their religious profession and their respon- 
sibility as citizens. Religion has been a 
matter of a specific kind and limited in its 
outreach to a few very distinct affairs. The 
vote-as-you-pray appeal which was so pop- 
ular at a certain period and with certain 
elements in political life, while striking the 
true note, fell upon deaf ears. The 
“Church vote” was a matter of jest. 

The spirit of democracy is altering that to- 
day. It is breaking down partisan lines and 
thrusting the question of personal char- 
acter into every election. It is increasingly 
difficult for a man of low morals to be elected 
to office. The Church vote is rapidly ceas- 
ing to be a jest. The attitude of the 
churches on political questions, such as the 
form of city government, the regulation or 
suppression of vice, as well as their attitude 
toward the candidates for office, is a matter 


IN THE NEW DAY 


79 


of increasing influence. This means that 
religion is invading the whole life of men. 
It is no less otherworldly that formerly, 
rightly conceived; but it tests itself not 
merely by a man’s personal experience or 
feeling or belief, but by his life and action 
and influence in the whole business of being 
a man. Democracy has so affected religion 
that no one can be a good Christian who is 
a bad or even a careless citizen. 

So too the spirit of democracy has affected 
the attitude of religion toward the industrial 
life of society. The labor unions have 
taught the churches some wholesome if 
humiliating lessons. Their close-knit or- 
ders, by which the interest of one becomes 
the interest of all; their heroic battles and 
sacrifices for their members’ welfare; their 
system of strikes, direct and sympathetic, 
mismanaged and ill-timed and even unjust 
as they have often been, but breathing the 
living spirit of brotherhood; their money 
gladly shared from scanty wages to reen- 
force their comrades battling perhaps across 
the continent for justice, misappropriated 
and misused as oftentimes the money may 


80 


THE OLD FAITH 


have been; all of these features of modern 
labor unions have shown the churches a 
larger but neglected duty. And the 
churches are learning the lesson. Democ- 
racy is showing religion that the conditions 
in which the other half of society lives are 
of vital importance to both halves; and is 
insisting that Christians cannot ignore their 
neighbors and have access to their God. 
Religion to-day is discovering that it can- 
not profit by cheap garments if the cheap- 
ness is wrung from sweatshop labor; it 
dare not be silent or inactive before the 
spectacle of the broken children of the mine 
and colliery and mill. Eighteenth-century 
religion put its ban on smuggled goods, on 
profits stolen from the government; twen- 
tieth-century religion is discovering that it 
must ban profits stolen from childhood and 
unfortunate mothers, overworked shopgirls 
and underpaid workmen. To put it in per- 
sonal terms, we are coming to see that 
Christian women dare not profit by bargain- 
counter sales made possible because of star- 
vation wages; Christian men dare not con- 
sent to or help to maintain profits of any 


IN THE NEW DAY 


81 


kind which necessitate injustice and hard- 
ship anywhere down the line. That is 
democracy revising the attitude of religion 
to industry. 

It has wrought a third change, namely, 
in the attitude of religion toward poverty. 
Religion has always been philanthropic, 
and there has been no greater or prouder 
argument for the wholesome motives of the 
Church than its institutions of charity and 
social help. It has listed its hospitals, asy- 
lums, homes, schools, orphanages, dispen- 
saries, and poor funds; it has mustered its 
multiplying organizations for community 
help and indiscriminate benevolence, and 
has concluded the story was done. Democ- 
racy has begun to illuminate that idea. As 
Professor Olin A. Curtis, of Drew Theo- 
logical Seminary, has finely said in a paper 
privately printed, “The democratic spirit 
is different from the philanthropic spirit, 
which cares for all men and tries to help all 
men. It is quite possible to be a philanthro- 
pist and yet not to be a democrat at all.” 1 
Democracy is teaching us that as Christians 

i Personal Paper, February, 1914, p. 13. — ■ - ■ •- 


82 


THE OLD FAITH 


we must not simply help the poor ; but must 
remove the necessity and conditions of pov- 
erty. Religion can no longer be proud of 
its distribution of money to men and women 
who have no work; it must be reorganizing 
industry so that they shall have work and 
not need poor funds. Democracy is com- 
pelling religion to see that to bring about 
milk inspection and adequate sewage and 
ventilated and uncrowded housing, public 
playgrounds and kindergartens, is more 
religious than to give away coffins for the 
babies of the poor, or provide nurses and 
medicines to the fever-stricken of the ten- 
ements, or eggs and milk and sanitariums 
for the helpless victims of preventable 
tuberculosis. That is religion’s latest les- 
son. Some of us are learning it with grave 
difficulty and much protest and very slowly. 
But we are learning it, and must learn it 
thoroughly or by our refusal be exiled 
from any fellowship in contemporary reli- 
gion, which has discovered that it is no 
longer a segment of personal experience 
and interest alone, but the very stuff and 
substance and spirit and atmosphere of the 


IN THE NEW DAY 


83 


ideals, functions, and responsibilities of 
society at large. 

But when we have seen in this fashion the 
influence of democracy on religion; when 
we have noted the changed conceptions of 
theology, the humanizing of the doctrine 
of God, the artificiality dropping away from 
the conceptions of atonement, the more 
practical interpretations of sin and penalty, 
the more social character of experience and 
immortality; when we have marked religion 
going out into life’s commonplaces — the 
courts and commercial houses and streets 
and factories and voting booths — and be- 
coming not a segment or phase of life but 
the whole atmosphere and attitude of life, 
under the revolutionizing influence of the 
democratic spirit; when we have seen this, 
then we discover another and arresting fact. 
The expanding and effective spirit of 
democracy reveals anew the unique and 
unalterable character of religion itself. 
Democracy alone introduces man to him- 
self. It shows him his weighty obligations 
to those around him. It reveals the other- 
wise unsuspected dignity of his human re- 


84 


THE OLD FAITH 


lationships, and the disciplining joy of 
mutual service. It gives him the inspira- 
tion and responsibility of brotherhood and 
transforms the world from a battlefield into 
a home. But democracy is a servant and 
not a master. It draws its commission 
from a source beyond itself. While it claims 
and seems to have influenced religion, it 
has been, after all, only a porter opening 
the door through which religion has passed 
from the cathedral into the market, from 
the cloister into the midst of toiling men. 
This is a truth affirmed alike by the witness 
of history and the voice of personal expe- 
rience. 

The history of the American people is 
not a greater testimony to the power and 
value of the democratic ideal than it is to 
the constraints of religion. We are people 
born in religious passion as well as bred by 
the enthusiasm of democracy. The May- 
flower brought a new political idea to New 
England, but only because its chief cargo 
was an unappeased religious conviction. 
With the exception of Virginia, which was 
a commercial experiment, and the Spanish 


IN THE NEW DAY 85 

settlements, which were establishments of 
imperial avarice, the moving force behind 
the enterprise of American colonization was 
religion. “Religious zeal swept the Jesuit 
missionaries across the northern wilderness 
to the Mississippi; German pietism made 
the Alleghenies ring with hymns ; Moravian 
missionaries consecrated the soil of Ohio; 
the Society of Friends gave a State the 
name of Penn, and a city the name of broth- 
erly love; English Puritanism stamped its 
tradition on the conscience of New Eng- 
land ” 1 

So much for the founding of the nation. 
These modern movements and ideals which 
have been thrown in apparent contrast with 
the Church and Christianity to the supposed 
discredit of the latter, have what source? 
The newer conception of government 
enunciated in the imperishable language of 
Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, “government 
of the people, for the people, by the people,” 
from what fountain did it stream? It is a 
conception unheard of where the Christian 
religion has not come to sovereignty. It is 


i Peabody: Approach to the Social Question, p. 160. 


86 


THE OLD FAITH 


sprung from but one source, the New Tes- 
tament, and from but one mind, that of Him 
who said: “Ye know that they who are 
accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it 
over them; and their great ones exercise 
authority over them. But it is not so among 
you: but whosoever would become great 
among you, shall be your minister; and who- 
soever would be first among you, shall be 
servant of all.” From what ultimate 
human sources have come the new interest 
and zeal and sacrifice on behalf of a reor- 
ganization of society to secure justice both 
in labor and its rewards for the men and 
women in our great industries, for the 
deliverance of women from the bondage of 
bitter conditions of employment, to rescue 
childhood from the crime and tragedy of 
child-labor? Only from the New Testament 
and the religion it inspires and of which it 
is the charter; only from Him who set a 
child in the midst and said, “Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven.” The workman, the 
woman, and the child were alike negligible 
before the New Testament came, and are 
negligible to-day where it has not been 


IN THE NEW DAY 


87 


carried to influence and power. India, 
Africa, and China, to name none of the 
many others, are majestic witnesses to the 
sole and singular ministry of the New 
Testament and its religion on behalf of 
womanhood, childhood, and toil. And cry 
out as the enemies of the Church and reli- 
gion do, vehement as may be their hostility 
to the name of Christianity and the profes- 
sions of Christians, it is nevertheless the 
spirit of the New Testament, the spirit of 
the Christianity which they assail, that has 
taken form and voice in the forces oper- 
ative now in the social redemption of our 
day. In clear and compelling fashion 
before our very eyes the parable of Jesus is 
being fulfilled, that the kingdom of heaven 
is as a bit of leaven which afterward leavens 
the whole lump. Back of the boisterous 
and passionate sense of brotherhood and 
comradeship with which men to-day are 
fighting so madly though sincerely for the 
rights and privileges of labor, unacknowl- 
edged perhaps but no less vital and potent, 
is the accumulated drive of nineteen hun- 
dred years of Christian ideas slowly but 


88 


THE OLD FAITH 


inevitably pushing on to the salvation of 
society. Whence, then, comes our increas- 
ing solicitude for the unfortunate, our 
enlarging interest in the criminal, our wide- 
spread conviction that penalty shall be 
remedial? From what source have come our 
world-wide activity against the diseases 
which prey particularly upon the the poor, 
our ever louder demands that society shall 
guarantee housing, milk, and food supply, 
recreations and sanitation to those unable 
to secure them for themselves? They are 
unheard of except in Christian civilizations. 
This sense of solidarity with the less for- 
tunate, this pressure of obligation to those 
for whom life’s battle has been unjust and 
unequal, come only from Him who drew 
his picture of the final judgment as pro- 
ceeding on the basis of our ministry to our 
brethren in temporal things; who said that 
“Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these 
. . . ye did it unto me.” The new democ- 
racy, in other words, is the world rediscov- 
ering religion; it is humanity coming farther 
forward unto Christ. 

A parallel result of democracy, seen 


IN THE NEW DAY 


89 


thus clearly in its subordinate position, is 
to show the unalterable and unique char- 
acter of religion in personal experience. 
Democracy alone never satisfies the soul. 
Those whose temporal conditions are in 
every way comfortable are not thereby made 
content. The social and material conditions 
of men and women have steadily improved 
year after year, but their personal satisfac- 
tion is as remote as ever. Democracy can 
get men better wages, build them better 
homes, secure them better laws, provide 
them better schools, eliminate some of their 
diseases, surround them with a hundred 
advantages and acquisitions of comrade- 
ship and comfort, but it cannot minister to 
a mind diseased; it cannot defend them 
from a bitter conscience; it cannot comfort 
them in sorrow, or deliver them from sin, or 
light the darkness of the grave. Democracy 
cannot guarantee the virtue of woman or 
the integrity of men. It can produce liberty 
but cannot prevent lust. In the midst of 
perfect democracy, if that be all, there will 
still be broken hearts and blasted hopes, 
and sinful, shameful deeds, and the fear of 


90 


THE OLD FAITH 


death. In the supreme realities of the per- 
sonal life democracy is but a name and the 
shadow of substance that is passed. As 
Matthew Arnold whispered to himself the 
last day of his life on earth, “The cross still 
stands, and in the straits of the soul makes 
its ancient appeal.” And the cross is not 
the symbol of democracy but the seal of reli- 
gion. Democracy, I said, introduces man 
to himself. Religion introduces man to 
God. This is the fundamental necessity 
without which democracy can only deepen 
discontent as it satisfies the body while leav- 
ing the soul impoverished. “Thou hast 
made us for thyself, and our heart finds no 
rest until it rests in thee.” Amid the pomps 
and pageantry of England’s world-wide 
empire, Rudyard Kipling saw the truth: 

The tumult and the shouting dies, 

The captains and the kings depart; 

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice. 

An humble and a contrite heart. 

The age in which we live, with its passion- 
ate enthusiasm for brotherhood, for polit- 
ical justice, for social opportunity, for 


IN THE NEW DAY 


91 


industrial righteousness, its sacrificial labor 
for the oppressed, the unfortunate, and the 
poor, confirms as never before the supreme 
and inevitable character of religion and the 
world’s need of it. The age in which we 
live is crying with a thousand voices the 
inexorable question of our Lord: “What 
shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul?” 


Less introspective than our fathers, more con- 
cerned with the problems of social than of indi- 
vidual sin, we find in Jesus our leader in the struggle 
for social righteousness, the prophet of spiritual de- 
mocracy, the preacher and founder of the kingdom 
of God. But for us, too, as for earlier generations, 
his personality retains its perennial freshness. For 
us, as for them, he is Saviour as well as leader, 
the one in whom we find the answer to our indi- 
vidual as well as our social need. If we are to 
define God in terms of a single character, it is to 
Jesus that we must turn. 

This appeal is independent of the fluctuations of 
critical opinion. However the critics may recon- 
struct the story that lies back of the Gospels, they 
cannot alter the picture the Gospels present. Here, 
in the pages of the evangelists, we meet a figure 
so individual and distinctive that after all the 
lapse of centuries he still speaks to us with a spiritual 
authority as direct and compelling as that which 
won him his first disciples by the lake shore. For 
us, as for them, he expresses in terms of a human 
life our highest thought of God . — William Adams 
Brown: Modern Theology and the Preaching of 
the Gospel, p. 207f. 


CHAPTER III 

THE INCREASING CHRIST 

The age in which we live is a complex 
and questioning age. It is fed, in spite of 
itself, from these streams which flow from 
out an unappreciated past, and swept at 
the same time by these cross currents of 
modern knowledge and feeling. It has de- 
veloped new powers and evolved new hopes. 
It has uncovered many falsehoods and 
discovered many truths. It has been in- 
spired by many experiences and disillu- 
sioned by many more. It is an age of 
vaster resources and greater accomplish- 
ments in many directions than of any before 
it. To what conclusion, then, may we 
come, if to any, concerning what, with 
all these changes, the age accepts as the 
irreducible and adequate finality in religion? 
Science has changed the terms in which the 
truths of religion can be satisfactorily ex- 
pressed, and democracy has thrust its once 
95 


96 


THE OLD FAITH 


restricted axioms into the broad and temper- 
ing activities of social relationship. Reli- 
gion has become a matter of the laboratory 
and the street, of the astronomer’s instru- 
ments, the biologist’s microscope, the voter’s 
booth, and the craftsman’s bench, where 
formerly it was perhaps too much an affair 
of manuscripts and altars and personal 
introspection. But religion at heart and in 
substance has not changed. It is constantly 
revitalized, not destroyed; vindicated in 
surprising fashion, but not banished. It is 
as always the revelation of and relation of 
the soul to the personal God. And that 
means what? 

The preceding chapters have already 
indicated the answer the present writer will 
make to the question. It is the answer of 
the Christian Church since the Church be- 
gan. Dr. Gordon has voiced it in a sin- 
gularly beautiful sentence, saying, “We are 
here under the shadow of an Infinite Name; 
we are living and dying in the heart of an 
enfolding Presence.” 1 The age, to use a 
well-worn word of theology, is Christocen- 


1 The Christ of To-day, p. 61. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


97 


trie. Not long ago the statement was 
soberly made, in some quarter, that science 
will be the religion of the future. It would 
be fairly difficult to say just what that 
means; Israel Zangwill tried to tell us, 
though with not an amazing success. But 
whatever it means, science will be the reli- 
gion of the future only as science becomes 
the revelation of Christ. The author of a 
letter which lies upon my desk as these 
words are being written says, “I am a 
Socialist, and to me . . . Socialism is God’s 
way out.” No one can say what Socialism 
is going to be; but if it is ever going to be 
God’s way out, it will be so only when it 
becomes the reincarnation of Christ. Nor 
is this simply the bold and prejudiced 
declaration of one who pleads a case. Mr. 
Winston Churchill, surely a very modern 
Saul among the prophets, in an address at 
the University of California, said, “It will 
be strange indeed if we do not arrive at the 
conclusion that the world has still in Jesus 
Christ something to grow into instead of 
out of, and that when we shall have reached 
the new boundaries he has set, it will be 


08 


THE OLD FAITH 


time enough to think of a new prophet and 
a new religion.” From quite a different 
direction, and one to which a large part of 
Christendom has been looking with great 
apprehension and not a little fear, comes 
the authoritative declaration of the Rev. 
George Jackson, that “the net result of the 
fierce conflict which has raged for the last 
seventy-five years around the New Testa- 
ment documents has been to make clearer 
than ever the solidity of the historical basis 
of Christianity and the incomparable posi- 
tion of Christ as the supreme Person of 
history.” 1 

Than this subject of the Person of Christ, 
there is none before the thoughtful minds 
of our generation more imperious and im- 
portant. Unless all signs fail we are well 
into the beginning of a controversy con- 
cerning it comparable only to the mighty 
debates of the fourth century. “Who was 
Jesus? What was the purpose of his life 
and teaching? What significance have he 
and his message for the striving multitudes 
of to-day?” These are the questions which 


1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modem Mind, p. 104. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


99 


the authors of a recent able review of liberal 
thought say “are becoming matters of the 
greatest consequence to the whole of hu- 
manity.” 1 To them other inquiries are 
added: “Have we still the right to preach 
this Jesus to others? Has he not become 
the object of the greatest doubt on our 
part?” And it is in an attempt satisfac- 
torily to answer these questions that the 
volume cited has been produced. 

But liberal theology, as it is technically 
called, can never answer these questions. It 
confines itself to too restricted an area of 
investigation. It seeks “to present an ac- 
count of Jesus as he appears in the light of 
a scientific study of the historical records” 
— which is very good, with certain serious 
qualifications, one of which is that it shall 
be guided by the records and not emasculate 
or distort them, that it may reach its precon- 
ceptions. But the main weakness of this 
liberal Christology is, as the Rev. Maurice 
Jones has well written, “that it draws a 
portrait of Jesus which does not overstep 

1 Weinel and Widgery: Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, 
p. 27. 


100 


THE OLD FAITH 


the limits of the human, and yet claims for 
this conception of the Ideal Man the very 
extremes of spiritual value, and sets him up 
as an object of religious worship.” 1 The 
fault with this school of scientific theology 
is that it has too exclusively a backward 
look. It is well to search for and to find 
the historical Jesus; but the mighty effects 
which have followed his exaltation into the 
theological Christ, against which liberal 
Christology protests, are too real, too per- 
manent and powerful, to be dismissed as 
having flowed from nothing more than the 
mental aberration or social enthusiasm or 
religious fervor of the first-century disciples 
of the Ideal Man. The historical Christ 
is more than a figure in the New Testament 
records and the chance allusions of a Roman 
historian; he is a force in the history which 
has followed down these nineteen centuries, 
and it is in them, as well as in the docu- 
mentary records, that he is to be discovered. 

There has been comment enough on the 
theological cry of modern years, “Back to 
Christ !” but this much may yet be said : that 


1 Maurice Jones: The New Testament in the Twentieth Century, p. 21. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


101 


when you have gone back to Christ you find 
that he has gone on. He is the same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever; but it is not a 
sameness either in size or meaning or power. 
It is a sameness in motive and spirit. Christ 
comes to the world, out of a thousand wist- 
ful dreams and prayers and hopes of men, 
and takes his place as a figure in history, a 
man of Galilee, the citizen of a Roman 
province, a member of a Hebrew tribe, a 
participant in an historic religion already 
centuries old. He never travels beyond the 
little land in which he was born ; is untouched 
by the literature and art, the civilizations, 
politics, and cultures which lie out beyond 
his own people; he knows nothing of alien 
life or faith or customs; speaks no language 
but the provincial tongue of the common 
people of his race. He lives the life of an 
artisan and is familiarly known as such 
until the age of thirty; then for not more, 
and probably for less, than three years 
wanders from city to city and town to town 
and field to mountain, a prophet without 
honor in his own country. In the capital of 
his people he comes into collision with the 


102 


THE OLD FAITH 


ecclesiastical system and authorities, and on 
a charge of treason to Rome, is executed as 
a common criminal by the Roman govern- 
ment. A man of specific time, in a restricted 
geographical area, of a marked and isolated 
race, of a strict and exclusive religious sect 
— that is the historic Jesus. Immediately, 
however, he becomes more. In all the vary- 
ing expressions of our religion, through all 
its changing moods and emphasis, suited to 
every age, appropriate to every condition, 
the citizen of every country and the spirit 
of every advance, he fulfills the farthest 
interpretations of his own declaration, “I 
came that they may have life, and may have 
it abundantly.” 

He fits perfectly into the scheme of the 
first century of our era, and yet the latest 
and most progressive mind has not over- 
taken him. Simon Peter, in the days of 
his flesh, said: “Lord, to whom shall we go? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life.” And 
eighteen hundred years later Johann Fried- 
rich Strauss, who began the long hostility 
of destructive criticism, wrote that “Christ 
is the one character without the idea of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


103 


whom in the mind personal piety is impos- 
sible,” 1 while J ohn Stuart Mill, who, if 
ever a man could be cold intellect devoid of 
religious experience and sympathies, was 
that man, has left on record his judgment, 
saying, “That which, after all, to me would 
be the best and highest form of life would 
be to live as Jesus Christ would have ap- 
proved.” Whatever forms, amid the 
streaming influences that beat upon it now, 
our religion shall from time to time assume, 
unless it shall utterly cease to be, it can 
never be separated from Jesus Christ, who 
is “the image of the invisible God, the first- 
born of all creation: . . . and he is before 
all things, and in him all things consist . . . 
that in all things he might have the pre- 
eminence.” Nor is this in the narrower 
limits of what we designate as “religious” 
life and thought. “Christ is the creator of 
our human world. The worth of the indi- 
vidual, the reality of social union, the sanc- 
tity of home, the infinite meaning of love, 
the eternal validity of our ideas of right- 
eousness, freedom, and God, all the ultimate 


Cf. Carpenter: Witness to the Influence of Christ, p. 30. 


104 


THE OLD FAITH 


realities of our human world, are the crea- 
tion of Christ .’’ 1 

He is the one constantly increasing per- 
sonality and influence in the social life and 
institutions of humanity. All local, tem- 
poral, and sectarian characteristics slip 
away from him. He becomes the universal 
figure. Set him beside the teachers and 
religious leaders of the world, and the differ- 
ence is immeasurable. Buddha is always 
the same. He is a figure of a remote cen- 
tury, of a singular social order, of a specific 
type of thought and feeling. Confucius 
never changes. He is Chinese to the core 
and never otherwise. He makes no appeal 
beyond his own race. The walls of China 
are down but he does not cross the border. 
Mohammed is Arab to-day, as he was when 
he fled for his life. Millions of people name 
him as their souls’ Lord, but they are not 
world-wide people. He too speaks to cer- 
tain minds and affects certain kinds of sym- 
pathies. All of these are separate from the 
religion they brought. Cut Buddha out of 
Buddhism and it will make no difference. 


1 Gordon: Christ and To-day, p. 31. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


105 


Discover that Confucius borrowed all his 
wisdom and Confucianism is as strong as 
ever. Mohammed passes and may be for- 
gotten, but Mohammedanism is unimpaired. 
It is not so with Christ. Born a Hebrew, 
his language knows no provincialisms. He 
speaks to men of all ages, climates, coun- 
tries, degrees of culture, and depths of deg- 
radation. His truth and its disciples live 
under the skies which Mohammedanism 
calls its own, multiply among the followers 
of Confucius and the languorous India 
of the Buddha. The morals of these other 
teachers are colored by the customs, char- 
acter, and traditions of race and society. 
The morals of Jesus have neither modifi- 
cations nor adjustments; they are the same 
in all continents and among all peoples 
in all social orders. This Jew of a distant 
century and a minor province has become 
the chief figure before two hundred and 
fifty millions of people, of all races, lan- 
guages, and customs, and to none of them 
does he seem to be either a Jew or a figure 
of the past or with provincial and restricted 
sympathies. Neither can he be disassoci- 


104 


THE OLD FAITH 


realities of our human world, are the crea- 
tion of Christ.” 1 

He is the one constantly increasing per- 
sonality and influence in the social life and 
institutions of humanity. All local, tem- 
poral, and sectarian characteristics slip 
away from him. He becomes the universal 
figure. Set him beside the teachers and 
religious leaders of the world, and the differ- 
ence is immeasurable. Buddha is always 
the same. He is a figure of a remote cen- 
tury, of a singular social order, of a specific 
type of thought and feeling. Confucius 
never changes. He is Chinese to the core 
and never otherwise. He makes no appeal 
beyond his own race. The walls of China 
are down but he does not cross the border. 
Mohammed is Arab to-day, as he was when 
he fled for his life. Millions of people name 
him as their souls’ Lord, but they are not 
world-wide people. He too speaks to cer- 
tain minds and affects certain kinds of sym- 
pathies. All of these are separate from the 
religion they brought. Cut Buddha out of 
Buddhism and it will make no difference. 


1 Gordon: Christ and To-day, p. 31. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


105 


Discover that Confucius borrowed all his 
wisdom and Confucianism is as strong as 
ever. Mohammed passes and may be for- 
gotten, but Mohammedanism is unimpaired. 
It is not so with Christ. Born a Hebrew, 
his language knows no provincialisms. He 
speaks to men of all ages, climates, coun- 
tries, degrees of culture, and depths of deg- 
radation. His truth and its disciples live 
under the skies which Mohammedanism 
calls its own, multiply among the followers 
of Confucius and the languorous India 
of the Buddha. The morals of these other 
teachers are colored by the customs, char- 
acter, and traditions of race and society. 
The morals of Jesus have neither modifi- 
cations nor adjustments; they are the same 
in all continents and among all peoples 
in all social orders. This Jew of a distant 
century and a minor province has become 
the chief figure before two hundred and 
fifty millions of people, of all races, lan- 
guages, and customs, and to none of them 
does he seem to be either a Jew or a figure 
of the past or with provincial and restricted 
sympathies. Neither can he be disassoci- 


106 


THE OLD FAITH 


ated from the religion which bears his name. 
The disciples of these other religious teach- 
ers have recourse in the experiences of life 
to the words of their book, the sayings of 
the sage, the formulas of the saint. The 
author of the book, the sage, and the saint 
are immaterial. In the experiences of life 
his followers turn not to Christianity but to 
Christ. 

Through Him the first fond prayers are said 
Our lips of childhood frame; 

The last low whispers of our dead 
Are burdened with His name. 

And this expansion of the personality of 
Christ until he is the universal figure, the 
native of all countries, the Kinsman of all 
men, is reflected in the extension of the prin- 
ciples and spirit which he has enunciated and 
incarnated in the life of nations. Certain 
supercilious folk, whose wide travels in the 
flesh have not removed the insulation from 
their minds, are fond of remarking that 
Christianity is only a minor quantity com- 
pared with the other great religions of the 
world ; and they quote the numerical 
strength of Buddhism with its 400,000,000 


IN THE NEW DAY 


107 


adherents and Mohammedanism with its 
140,000,000. But the test of religion is not 
its numbers but the kind of life it produces. 
And by that test how do these religions 
stand? In five hundred years their adher- 
ents and the civilization they have produced 
have not made a single contribution to the 
sum of human knowledge, have not written 
a new law, developed a new tenderness, 
broadened by an inch the sympathies, or 
uplifted for a moment the hopes of society 
and men, except as they themselves have 
been stimulated, though perhaps uncon- 
sciously, by some influences of Christianity. 
In the life of the world and its institutions 
they are a negligible quantity. The world 
at large, its thought, its art, its politics, all 
its multiplying activities are dominated by 
the Christian nations. 

Going a step farther, the standards and 
ideals of social and national life which are 
universally recognized as the best and most 
elevating, are standards and ideals derived 
from the teaching and the spirit of Christ. 
One of the striking sayings of Jesus, quoted 
by John, is that “the prince of this world 


108 


THE OLD FAITH 


hath been judged.” It was never so true 
as now. Diplomacy, commerce, adminis- 
tration, society, all have been judged; they 
measure their permanence and worth by 
their approximation to the spirit and the 
motive of Christ, and even now amid the 
noise of navies, the tramp of armed men, the 
roar of forge and factory where munitions 
of war are being made in increasing quan- 
tities, amid the din of battle shouts and 
threats, steadily the tide of human senti- 
ment is rising against war as it rose against 
slavery, and when the day shall come when 
battles shall be only memories and guns be 
mute, the world will own the triumph of the 
Prince of Peace. 

This seems to lie a long time ahead. But 
the time is on the way. The transformation 
of humanity takes a long time. Christ called 
men brothers, and Paul said that in Christ 
there is neither bond nor free; but it took 
eighteen hundred years before there were 
no slaves in North America. A long time 
ahead, but it is there and swinging nearer 
with every revolution of the planet! The 
famous mosque in Saint Sophia, now a Mo- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


109 


hammedan stronghold, was formerly a 
Christian church, one of its chief features 
being a great fresco of Christ. In 1888 the 
Sultan of Turkey, seeing it, said, “Cover 
it! His time is not yet come.” 1 “Not yet 
come” but coming! In greater fashion than 
ever his forerunner dreamed, “He must in- 
crease,” till the knowledge of God shall 
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. 

But this expansion of the life and spirit 
of Christ in the society and institutions of 
humanity, great and fruitful as it is, is not 
the sum of his increasing influence. He is 
the increasing influence and personality in 
the intellectual life of the world. Philos- 
ophy for all its centuries has been seeking 
for a clue to the existence and order of the 
world, but one after another its systems fail. 
Each makes contribution to the quenchless 
onreach of the minds of men, but all end in 
and tacitly admit their incompleteness. It 
is to be remarked, further, that those artic- 
ulated schemes whereby the sages think to 
light the problem are found to be of con- 
tinuing value in proportion as they square 


» Quoted in Noble: Redemption of Africa, volume 1, p. 78. 


110 


THE OLD FAITH 


with the religious instincts of humanity, and 
particularly as they square with the reli- 
gious instincts which are confirmed and cul- 
tivated in the New Testament. All of 
them, however, are inadequate. On Her- 
bert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, with 
its Christless evolution, the dust has already 
begun to gather. From the majesty of 
Hegel, with his spirit coming into conscious- 
ness through history, to the misery of Hart- 
mann, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and 
the madness of Nietzsche, even the solid 
enduring dignity of Kant — with all that they 
have done in disciplining human thought 
and quickening the human spirit, all are 
incomplete, the best of them haunted by the 
wistful unacknowledged appeal of Chris- 
tian faith. 

Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be; 
They are but broken lights of thee. 

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

Philosophy has found no permanent and 
satisfying explanation of the world; but a 
philosophical scientist like Bergson is mak- 
ing place for Christ in his theory of its con- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


111 


tinuous unfolding, and the later writers 
are almost all influenced by Christ’s pres- 
ence, and compelled to shape their specu- 
lations to account for him. It is philos- 
ophy catching up with the New Testament, 
modern intellect overtaking Saint John 
to hear him say: “All things were made 
through him; and without him was not 
anything made that hath been made. In 
him was life; and the life was the light of 
men.” It is the writers of modern thought 
translating in spite of themselves the writer 
to the Hebrews, who nineteen centuries ago 
spoke of Jesus as one “for whom are all 
things, and through whom are all things.” 
It is Christ increasing in the intellectual life 
of humanity. 

This increase is demonstrated perhaps 
more practically by the increasing alle- 
giance to Christ on the part of the intellec- 
tual men of modern times. President 
George R. Grose, of De Pauw University, 
is authority for the statement that three of 
the most prominent scholars of Harvard 
University of the past decade — one a phi- 
losopher, one a psychologist, and one a geol- 


112 


THE OLD FAITH 


ogist — began their careers as materialists 
or agnostics, but before the close of the 
nineteenth century were avowed Christians. 
“Fifty years ago,” he says, further, “the 
drift of philosophic thought in the univer- 
sities of Europe and America was toward 
the side of unbelief; to-day the great lead- 
ers in education and the large majority of 
the student body are Christian believers.” 1 
President Remsen, of the Johns Hopkins 
University, he quotes as saying with great 
earnestness: “I think I have some right to 
speak on this question, having devoted my 
life to the study of science. And I say to 
you the most scientific life that I know is 
the Christian life.” 2 

Turn to that body of formulated think- 
ing which most easily shapes and reflects the 
thought-life of the age, literature and the 
drama, and the discovery there is striking. 
Granted that never before was there so 
much frivolity and trash exploited in fiction, 
and never so much that is tawdry and cheap 
on the stage, yet no earlier age ever wit- 


1 Outlook for Religion, p. 17. 

2 Op. cit. 18f. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


113 


nessed an enthusiasm for Christ on the part 
of literature and the drama such as our age 
witnesses. Hall Caine’s White Prophet, 
Marie Corelli’s Master Christian, Elsa 
Barker’s The Son of Mary Bethel, Suder- 
mann’s Magda, and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 
Mary Magdalene, and the whole phase of 
the literature of New Testament themes; 
Moody’s The Faith Healer, Jerome’s Pass- 
ing of the Third Floor Back, Kennedy’s 
Servant in the House and The Terrible 
Meek, and Churchill’s Inside of the Cup, 
Peabody’s The Piper, and a whole school 
of European prose, poetic, and dramatic 
literature of the last twenty years are wit- 
nesses to his enlarging place in modern 
thought. It comprises a body of writers so 
notable and significant that already books 
are being written about it, and the author of 
one of such critical and reviewing volumes 
characterizes his work and the age itself as 
The Promise of the Christ- Age in Recent 
Literature. And this increasing influence 
and place of Christ as a motif in the liter- 
ature of men is not more marked and signif- 
icant than the place in literature occupied 


114 


THE OLD FAITH 


by the few fragments of his utterances 
which have been preserved for us. Alto- 
gether apart from the influence of the New 
Testament, and particularly the Gospels, 
in the whole life of succeeding centuries; 
apart from the fact that behind every sig- 
nificant movement, institution, and reform 
in society, government and religion have 
been the New Testament and its specific 
declaration and spirit, the words of Jesus, 
themselves, hold high position among the 
literary masterpieces, and are gathering an 
increasing estimate and appeal. “What is 
the most touching story ever told?” Charles 
Dickens was asked. He replied at once, 
“The story of the prodigal son.” Coleridge 
counted the Beatitudes the finest passage in 
all literature, and Booth, asked by a friendly 
company to recite, melted all the circle as 
he repeated the Lord’s Prayer. Edmund 
Burke once declared that the supreme docu- 
ment on the rights of man was the Sermon 
on the Mount. “Look on our divinest Sym- 
bol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his life, and 
his biography, and what followed therefrom. 
Higher has the human thought not yet 


IN THE NEW DAY 


115 


reached: this is Christianity and Christen- 
dom. 5 ’ 1 And Goethe, the supreme intellect 
of German literature and life, a few days 
before his death prophesied the passing of 
all divisions among men in anticipation of 
the time when they should have reached 
their largest life and freedom through hav- 
ing fully comprehended and inwardly expe- 
rienced the pure teaching and love of Jesus 
Christ. 2 Not yet, but coming! we have not 
yet discerned the fullness of his stature, but 
in the widening life of mind and thought, 
as in the realm of nations, governments, and 
society the day is hastening on by prophet 
bards foretold when “of his kingdom there 
shall be no end.” 

In the details of the practical conduct 
of life, as distinguished from the verified 
but no less personal generalizations and the 
intellectual moods and movements cited 
above, Christ is increasingly the determin- 
ing, if unacknowledged influence. It is 
almost trite at this late day to remark that 
the payment of twenty millions of dollars 


i Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, p. 170. 

* Compare Hillis: Influence of Christ in Modern Life, passim. 


116 


THE OLD FAITH 


to Spain for the Philippine Islands, and the 
expenditure of money and men in the pa- 
tient, sacrificial development of the Filipino 
people toward self-government and, what is 
more vital, capacity for self government, 
was an immeasurable advance upon any- 
thing the Old Testament in its highest vi- 
sion of national ethics had ever seen, or 
urged. It was far in advance of any prec- 
edent the world had offered in the relations 
of a victorious to a vanquished nation. It 
squares only with the spirit of Christ inter- 
preted in a larger way than even the first 
century interpreted him. The passion for 
brotherhood also, which to-day is working 
out, in turbulent as well as peaceful forms, 
the industrial reformation and social heal- 
ing which bulk so large in the business 
of democracy, finds its germ in the human 
life of Christ and its charter in his new 
commandment to love one’s neighbor as 
oneself. It has often been remarked, and 
not infrequently with an emphasis too little 
qualified, that the discontent and hostility 
of the industrial order, however bitter 
toward the Church, is never other than cor- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


117 


dial and reverent toward Christ. There are 
exceptions, of course, to this repeated 
declaration, though taken broadly it is un- 
doubtedly true. But the significance of the 
place of Christ in the social thinking of to- 
day is even more clearly seen in the inability 
of even the least reverent schools of thought 
to get along without him. The daring voices 
of an earlier generation, which in their en- 
thusiasm for man and their hatred of injus- 
tice, unrebuked by ecclesiasticism, cried out 
against God, religion, and the Bible, are 
now growing faint. The Industrial Work- 
ers of the World, it may be said in paren- 
thesis, carry banners inscribed, “No God 
and No Master/’ but for all the tumult they 
make from time to time, like many other 
turbulences, history is against them. The 
forces of sanity rather than of violence 
make the enduring contributions to life, 
and the dangers to human institutions 
are not those of destruction but of disin- 
tegration. The leaders of modern social 
movements, antagonistic as they may be 
to the established forms and uncompromis- 
ing as they may be with the traditional 


118 


THE OLD FAITH 


conceptions of society, turn Christ ward for 
reenforcement and inspiration. Kalthoff 
and Bouck White and their industrial 
and literary comrades, are neither pro- 
found thinkers nor accurate expositors ; 
their apparent knowledge of the New Tes- 
tament is happily free from many salient 
facts; the Christ of their strabismic vision 
is singularly independent of much of the 
express declaration of the Gospels. But 
their exposition, inadequate as it often is, 
only emphasizes the impossibility of main- 
taining any humanitarian enterprise of 
large effectiveness and permanence, apart 
from the reenforcements of his character 
and teaching, while the undisputed spring 
and power of the modern social program 
derive from its appeal to the Hebrew 
prophets as they are interpreted by the 
Christian mind, and to the words of Christ. 

Here, however, we face the commonest 
peril of much of our modern thinking about 
Christ, namely, that we shall think of him 
as a presence and influence and spirit in 
these vaster historic and racial movements 
— in society and government and literature 


IN THE NEW DAY 


119 


and philosophy — and lose sight of his pri- 
mary and supreme meaning for the indi- 
vidual soul. The older artificial expressions 
and standards of religion no longer serve; 
the elder, stiffer, precise, and binding form- 
ulas are no longer received. We conceive 
of God in different fashion, we have another 
view of the Bible, we regard the Church dif- 
ferently, we put professions of personal reli- 
gion to different tests. We see Christ after 
a manner other than the generations before 
us saw him. How, then, does it stand with 
the individual soul and the person of Christ ? 
Here too he is the increasing Christ; as out 
of all their scientific theory and social exper- 
iment men are learning with new emphasis 
that the old needs of the soul remain unal- 
tered amid whatever new conditions of life 
may be and new outlooks of mind. I do 
not name all the phases of personal expe- 
rience wherein the proof may be made, for 
two will be sufficient. 

Christ is increasingly the power and hope 
of the individual soul in its experience of sin. 
Whatever else may be swept away by the 
amazing researches and achievements of the 


120 


THE OLD FAITH 


modern mind, this remains. Science may 
seem to trace the biography of sin and take 
away its ancient meaning; but science can- 
not take away the sense of responsibility, 
the pressure of guilt, and the instinct for 
retribution. Democracy may locate the 
social sources and spread the individual re- 
sponsibility upon society at large. But 
beating past all the bulwarks modern 
thought has presumed to raise around the 
soul, the sense of individual and personal 
obligation and misdeeds and failure crowds 
home upon the heart; and there is no 
help or healing in all the fine and gracious 
theories and conduct of the Christless day. 
From them a soul may learn, if it need 
to learn, the way to health and service; 
from them it may gather, if it need to 
gather, wise counsel and alluring hope. 
But what the soul finds it needs is not 
knowledge but strength. It does not care 
how it got in this way, and it is not 
enough to learn how it is possible to get out; 
it must somehow have the power of getting 
out. It is not information a soul needs 
but enduement; not a map but an energy; 


IN THE NEW DAY 


121 


not a description but a deliverance. “Who 
shall deliver me out of the body of this 
death?” This is the cry of the soul, a cry 
not all the streaming influence of modern 
knowledge and enthusiasm can stifle. “I 
thank God through Jesus Christ our 
Lord.” That is the abiding answer and 
experience. “We have some beautiful reli- 
gions in China,” a Chinese student said, 
“teaching us the loftiest morality, but they 
have no dynamic behind them, no driving 
force to help a man to victory. Christianity 
not only calls us to a noble life — it enables 
us to live it. It not only tells us to be good 
— it gives us, by the power of the crucified 
and risen Jesus, the strength to be good.” 1 
That is the unalterable personal experience 
— the experience of sin and responsibility 
and impotence; and here is the unaltered 
complement to that experience — the re- 
deeming power of Christ in personal life. 
Yonder it is Jerry McAuley transformed 
in a cell in a New York jail; there it is 
Governor Patterson, of Tennessee; here it 
is an outcast at some Helping-Hand Mis- 


1 Atkins: Life Worth While, p. lOlf. 


122 


THE OLD FAITH 


sion; everywhere, through all gradations of 
society and self-respect and culture, in all 
variations of circumstances and opportunity 
and habit, the witness of the passing years 
is to Christ of personal experience and per- 
sonal power. 

So too Christ is increasingly the hope and 
refuge of the soul in its quenchless, death- 
less hunger for conscious and personal life 
beyond the grave. It may be that in the 
years past the achievement of personal im- 
mortality bulked too exclusively in the 
thought of religious men and was too ex- 
clusively the business of the organized 
Church. In legal proceedings instituted in 
Kansas City some time ago, the petition de- 
fining the Holy Roman Apostolic Church 
affirmed that “The object of this society is 
to obtain eternal happiness for the individ- 
ual after death.” And that has been, not 
only for Romanism but for too much of 
Protestantism, the only apparent object of 
the Church. That, as we have come to see, 
is one of the objects, but only one; the pri- 
mary object is not happiness in the next 
world but holiness in this. And yet the 


IN THE NEW DAY 


128 


hope of future happiness is one of the great- 
est inspirations to present holiness. “Im- 
mortality,” as Dr. Gordon has written, “is 
the leverage of righteousness, the power by 
which humanity is raised out of the depths 
of habits and vices worse than animal; it is 
the vast support of the spirit against the 
flesh, the infinite ally of love against bru- 
tality, the necessary and mighty postulate 
of the true life of mankind.” 1 Thomas 
Huxley might very well regard with horror, 
as he wrote to John Morley, the prospect of 
annihilation. And yet, for all the wistful- 
ness and quenchlessness of the desire for im- 
mortality, where is there any convincing 
ground of hope of it? John Fiske put the 
whole case for man apart from Divine 
revelation, when he said, “I believe in the 
immortality of the soul, not in the sense in 
which I accept the demonstrable truths of 
science, but as a supreme act of faith in 
the reasonableness of God’s work.” 2 That 
is better than nothing, though Huxley, a 
greater scientist than Fiske, could not find 


i Witness to Immortality, p. 299. 

* The Destiny of Man, p. 116. 


124 


THE OLD FAITH 


even that much. But how poor and unsat- 
isfying that is! Beside that stands Christ, 
a figure, the supreme figure, of history and 
yet a very living personal reality to the indi- 
vidual soul. “Who . . . brought life and 
immortality to light.” “I know him, whom I 
have believed, and I am persuaded” — not as 
to the reasonableness of God’s work — but 
“that he is able to guard that which I have 
committed unto him.” The mystery of it 
may be admitted at once; and for all our 
theological dexterity and the rhetorical ease 
with which it is possible for not a few inter- 
preters to explain in detail the whole proc- 
ess of Christian faith, the explanations do 
not explain. But with the mystery ad- 
mitted, the fact remains that with him in 
personal experience, death becomes a door- 
way into life; its night falls but to usher in 
the endless morning where those 

. . . “Angel faces smile 

Which we have loved long since, and lost awhile.” 

It is not simply a theory which has to be 
accounted for; it is this indubitable fact of 
personal certitude and peace which must be 


IN THE NEW DAY 


125 


reckoned with in any portrayal of the posi- 
tion of Christ in life. It is not a matter of 
scholarship or special insight or singular 
training; it is the experience of men and 
women without regard to condition of life 
or knowledge or social inheritance, that they 
and their dead shall live by the power of 
their personal relation to Jesus Christ. No 
man who has observed even casually the 
procession of bereavement among the lives 
with which he comes in contact but will be 
impressed increasingly with the ineffable 
force with which Christ, as Matthew Arnold 
said of the cross, in the straits of the soul 
makes his ancient appeal. A single illus- 
tration will be permitted as typical of the 
form in which the fact of certitude univer- 
sally expresses itself and vainly demands ex- 
planation from those who would believe that 
the day of Christ is waning. The writer sat 
one summer evening on the deck of a freight 
schooner lying at anchor in a North Carolina 
port. The captain sat beside him. The day’s 
work was done, and together they watched 
the shadows deepen on the shore and turn 
what Homer would have called the wine- 


126 


THE OLD FAITH 


dark water of the sound into black. “One 
by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, 
blossomed the lovely stars.” The wind 
stirred softly in the cordage while the 
schooner swung with the changing tide. In 
the frank confidences which twilight so sing- 
ularly brings to even reticent souls, the cap- 
tain talked much about his past. A strong 
man he was, toughened by forty years upon 
the water, knowing every nook and corner 
of the bays and coasts and inlets where he 
sailed, a master of winds and tides and cur- 
rents. His had been a life of hardship and 
exposure, of labor and loss and disappoint- 
ment. He had read little. The intellectual 
movements of the day were out of his ken 
entirely and he was equally a stranger to its 
political and social activities. He had no 
theories and no sentimentality. He read 
the Old Testament and understood little of 
it; much of the New was beyond his com- 
prehension. As he talked of the past it was 
doubtless inevitable that he should speak 
quietly of his greatest personal sorrow, the 
loss of his little girl; and with that painful 
detail which is characteristic of untrained 


IN THE NEW DAY 


127 


minds he spoke of the blue of her eyes and 
the gold of her childish curls. He told of 
her death, with the pathos of her winsome 
attempt to ease their grief as she whispered, 
“You needn’t be afraid; there isn’t any river, 
there’s only a little stream,” and then she 
crossed it while they held her hands and 
wept. And that had been twenty years be- 
fore, but there on the deck of the swinging 
schooner the captain was wiping his tears 
on the back of his knotted hand. “I tell 
you,” he said, “it’s going to be good to see 
her when I get there.” 

At the other extreme of life, to complete 
the illustration of this insistent certitude, is 
Lord Acton, with his encyclopedic learning, 
saying to his dying daughter, “Be glad, my 
child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ.” 1 
Where do men get this hope and confidence 
and peace in the long stress of unforgettable 
bereavement and the harassing adventure 
of their dying? Not from any thought of 
the reasonableness of God’s work; not from 
any theory of probabilities; only from the 
historic Christ become a living presence and 

1 Letters to Mary Gladstone, chap. lxxv. 


128 


THE OLD FAITH 


power in personal experience. It is here, 
then, that we find the only answer to the 
question with which the chapter began as 
to what the age is accepting as the irreduc- 
ible and adequate finality of religion. It 
is the living Christ. Here are the sense and 
experience of sin and the quenchless hope 
of immortality ; and religion, if it is to make 
any appeal whatever, must meet and an- 
swer that experience and that hope. They 
constitute the supreme constraints of human 
experience. They must find their satis- 
factory answer in another experience deep 
enough and supernatural enough and self- 
evidencing enough to command humanity 
at all times and in all conditions, and they 
find it only in Christ. “If any man sin, we 
have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus 
Christ the righteous : and he is the propitia- 
tion for our sins; and not for ours only, but 
also for the sins of the whole world.” “And 
this is life eternal, that they should know 
thee the only true God, and him whom thou 
didst send, even Jesus Christ.” 

Amid our busy generation many voices 
call. Men and women earnestly intent on 


IN THE NEW DAY 


129 


an intelligent faith and an effective religious 
conduct do well to heed. We dare not lose 
touch with the day in which we live, or grow 
deaf to its characteristic appeal. But in it 
all our confidence, our strength, our hope, 
our victory, will lie, as they have lain down 
nineteen hundred years of tumultuous his- 
tory, in the faith once delivered unto the 
saints; for we are “built upon the founda- 
tion of the apostles and prophets, Christ 
Jesus himself being the chief corner stone.” 


IV 

THE VINDICATED SCRIPTURES 


We must know what it is that we want to verify 
before we attempt the process of verification. . . . 
That revelation is a process in history prepares us 
to believe that it will find its verification in life. 
And especially I would emphasize that much in 
Scripture is the direct creation of experience. The 
Bible is preeminently a book of experimental re- 
ligion. What experience has created we may 
expect experience to verify. . . . But obviously the 
religious element in the Bible is all that religious 
experience can directly verify. — Peake: The Bible: 
Its Origin, Its Significance, and Its Abiding Worth, 
p. 470f. 


CHAPTER IV 

THE VINDICATED SCRIPTURES 

The question which the present age in- 
sistently demands concerning the Scriptures 
is, Are they true? It is practically a 
modern question, for the time has not long 
passed when, except by the heretic, it had 
not been even raised. There was a time not 
long since when the Bible stood before the 
Protestant as the Church stands before the 
Roman Catholic — the absolute authority for 
thought and life, concerning which a doubt 
was a deadly sin. This is not the place to 
trace the history of modern thought con- 
cerning the Bible. It will be sufficient to 
say that the study of the Scriptures, under 
the new light and with the new instruments, 
at the hand of later scholars, from the crit- 
ical and historical viewpoint, has given us 
practically a new Book. What kind of an 
influence the Bible used to have and what 
was the common method of reading it, may 
be best seen through the mind of John Bun- 
133 


134 


THE OLD FAITH 


yan, who writes in that marvelous autobio- 
graphy of his: 

I was almost made, about this time, to see some- 
thing concerning the beasts that Moses counted 
clean and unclean. I thought those Beasts were 
Types of Men; the clean , types of them that were 
the people of God; but the unclean , types of such 
as were the Children of the wicked One. Now, I read 
that the clean beasts Chewed the cud ; that is, 
thought I, they show us we must feed upon the 
Word of God. They also 'parted the hoof; I thought 
that signified we must part, if we would be saved, 
with the ways of ungodly men. And also, in fur- 
ther reading about them I found, that though we 
did chew the cud as the Hare , yet if we walked 
with Claws like a Dog , or if we did part the Hoof 
like the Swine , yet if we did not chew the cud as 
the Sheep , we were still, for all that, but unclean; 
for I thought the Hare to be a type of those that 
talk of the Word, yet walk in the ways of sin; and 
that the Swine was like him that parteth with 
his Outward pollutions, but still wanteth the Word 
of Faith, without which there could be no way of 
salvation, let a Man be never so devout . 1 

It is not to be questioned that the conclu- 
sions which Bunyan reaches concerning 


1 Grace Abounding, H 71. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


135 


personal religious life are sound, and true 
to scriptural teaching; but it is no longer 
possible to draw those conclusions from that 
particular scripture or those like it, in that 
highly artificial and allegorical fashion. To 
leap a long line of detailed criticism which 
has become a commonplace in modern think- 
ing about the Bible, our later scholarship 
has shown it to us as a collection of liter- 
ature, separable into various kinds, distin- 
guishable as to purpose, circumstances, 
authorship and date, a literature to be ap- 
proached as such and to be subjected as 
such to the same standards of criticism to 
which other literatures are subjected. For 
it must be borne in mind that it is the liter- 
ary quality of many portions of the Bible 
which keeps its figures and the influence of 
their lives so widely before us. Ex-Presi- 
dent Roosevelt called attention to this in his 
lecture before the University of Oxford — 
“The ruthless death scene between Jehu and 
Jezebel; wicked Ahab, smitten by the chance 
arrow, and propped in his chariot until he 
died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life be- 
cause he would not heed the Pharaoh’s 


136 THE OLD FAITH 

solemn warning, and mourned by all the 
singing men and all the singing women — 
the fates of these kings and this king’s 
daughter, are part of the common stock of 
knowledge of mankind. They were petty 
rulers of petty principalities ; yet, compared 
with them, mighty conquerors, who added 
empire to empire, Shalmaneser and S ar- 
gon, Amenotep and Rameses, are but 
shadows; for the deeds and the deaths of 
the kings of Judah and Israel are written 
in words that, once read, cannot be forgot- 
ten.” 1 

This critical study of the Scriptures, as 
carried on by the specialists into whose 
labors we have entered, has transformed the 
Bible from being an object almost of wor- 
ship into an inspiration for life, and has 
given Protestantism at last the spiritual 
liberty of the individual which it long ago 
professed to have won but really had not. 
The change of attitude toward the Bible, 
however, was not without serious perils, as 
the Church immediately discerned. The 
danger of this present-day attitude is that 


1 History as Literature, p. 24. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


137 


the method of approach shall be regarded 
as the paramount interest ; and that the crit- 
ical character of our general Bible reading 
shall rob us of our spiritual reenforcement. 
The present generation as it reads the Bible 
at all insists on what it calls the new point 
of view and spends much of its time on 
matters of date and authorship, distinguish- 
ing in the narratives between the legendary 
and the historical, between the actual and 
the metaphor. Instead of Moses penning 
the solemn story of creation and recording 
the sublime procession of Israel from Eden 
to the promised land, we are shown dim 
figures of seer and poet toiling in the pre- 
historic mists, and the cold hands of cal- 
culating priests shaping a code of religion 
and social conduct. Instead of revelation 
chiefly by miracle we are given revelation 
through history; for the ancient prophets 
foretelling in magic fashion the events of 
years and centuries to come, we have a line 
of statesmen wrestling with political and 
social problems, and a series of unknown 
editors rearranging into permanence their 
literary and forensic work. For the pyro- 


138 


THE OLD FAITH 


technic splendors of some sudden burst of 
vision such as we were brought up to believe 
was Saint John’s experience, we have dis- 
criminated a special body of apocalyptic lit- 
erature, after patient scrutiny of which we 
are led to believe the seer formed his own 
supreme production. Instead of the mys- 
terious and illogical but remarkably persist- 
ent theory, expressed or tacitly presumed, 
of verbal inspiration, we have version after 
version and revision upon revision. Getting 
back through the errors, imaginings, and 
misconceptions of generations past; laying 
bare the life out of which the Book has 
come ; searching, with growing apprecia- 
tion, through the social and intellectual 
processes, the historical sequences, the racial 
aptitudes and popular languages out of 
which and by which the revelation has been 
made, we are more and more approximating 
to the mind of the Spirit. We are getting 
a Bible to speak to men, no longer of the 
eighth century before Christ, or the first or 
the fifteenth century after Christ, but to 
men in a new world and a new day. We are 
getting a vessel large enough to carry the 


IN THE NEW DAY 


139 


hopes and loves and longings of men and 
to reveal God and Christ and salvation to 
men, not in a narrow world with shallow 
skies and mysterious seas and feeble hands 
and shortened outlooks, but in a world of 
infinite spaces and infinite time, of seas their 
thought has spanned, and skies their minds 
have rifled, to whom God and the universe 
are vaster by an immeasurable degree than 
any men before them ever dreamed. 

But, however necessary this is to a com- 
plete understanding of the documents with 
which we are dealing, at most it is only 
preparatory to the real business of the sin- 
cere reader. In these pursuits the scholars 
have only been making possible a more in- 
telligent and spiritual appreciation of the 
Scriptures as a whole ; they have been mak- 
ing straight in the desert of no little con- 
fusion a highway for our God. Unhappily, 
not only scholars but young men and 
young women in the schools and churches, 
and older men and women in the hard and 
testing bewilderment of practical life, have 
permitted the peculiarities of the highway 
to obscure for them the presence of God 


140 


THE OLD FAITH 


upon it ; they have become so concerned with 
the criticism of the Bible that its message 
is unheard. 

Another and even more threatening 
danger, to the superficially informed mind, 
is that presumed in some quarters to have 
arisen from the discoveries of modern 
science. The former conflict between reli- 
gion and science was long since seen to be 
unnecessary, and, indeed, impossible, except 
by a few belated intelligences, but the 
matter is adequately summarized by Pro- 
fessor Peake in his volume on the Bible: 
“First geology,” he writes, “and then the 
theory of evolution were imagined to have 
disposed of the claims made on behalf of 
the Bible with its six-days’ scheme and 
its doctrine of special creation and the 
brief period that it allows for the existence 
of man on this planet. And in this conflict 
with the Bible the physical and biological 
sciences have been reenforced by archseol- 
ogy. We have now evidence not simply for 
the antiquity of man but for the develop- 
ment of an elaborate civilization at a period 
earlier than that to which the Biblical chron- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


141 


ology assigns the creation of the human race. 
I pass over the other points in the quarrel, 
such as the creation of the heavenly bodies 
on the fourth day, or the questions raised 
touching the historical character of the 
Deluge. And here in particular it is 
thought that the advance of these sciences 
has hit Christianity in a vital place. The 
Pauline theology, we are told, is built on 
the assumption that the third chapter of 
Genesis contains a record of literal fact, 
and this assumption has now been proved 
to be incorrect.” 1 

Long ago it was realized by the leading 
minds of the Church that the criticism of 
the Bible from the viewpoints of literature, 
history, and science has empowered instead 
of impoverished it; and the most searching 
critics have again and again proven them- 
selves to be the most devout Christians. 
They have not changed the message of the 
Book, but the emphasis. “Once we have 
grasped the principle that revelation has 
come as a process in history,” to quote 
again from Professor Peake’s thorough- 


i The Bible: Its Origin, Its Significance, Its Abiding Worth, p. 6. 


142 


THE OLD FAITH 


going volume, “Scripture is invested for us 
with a new significance.” 1 There are, how- 
ever, many honest-minded men and women 
who have not yet apprehended this, and who 
can see only disaster from a method of judg- 
ment which seems to pick and choose among 
what they have been accustomed to consider 
the whole Word of the Lord. 

There are Bible readers, for instance, who 
say that if the early chapters of Genesis 
are not actually historical; if the story of 
Jonah and the whale is the literary form into 
which the majestic truth of the universal love 
of God is cast instead of being an actual 
event in the biography of Jonah and the 
physiology of the whale; if the Gospels are 
not single-minded and direct stories of the 
life of Jesus, written, as it were, at a sitting 
and by the very men whose names they bear, 
but are the final result of the apostolic age, 
preserving through various stages of de- 
velopment the figure and the message of 
Jesus Christ; if, in other words, the Bible 
is to be thus separated into its various forms 
of literature, the product of the same his- 


1 Op. cit., p. 468f. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


143 


torical and racial forces out of which all other 
literature springs, and if it is to be judged as 
other literature is to be judged, then it can 
exercise no more authority over us than any 
other literature can exercise; and, saying 
that, and concerned with the results of the 
literary criticism of the Bible, to the exclu- 
sion of its other and profounder meaning, it 
becomes a literary classic, read, if at all, 
with the same spirit and attitude which they 
bring to the literature of India or China, 
to the poetry of Homer or the history of 
Thucydides. 

Then there is a second class — men and 
women who go further, taking the position 
that either the Bible is true or it is not true. 
They do not distinguish, save in the most 
superficial manner, between different books, 
in their criticism; they make no allowances 
for differences in the portions of the Bible 
as to date, place, purpose, and circum- 
stance. But they declare, for instance, that 
if the first chapters of Genesis are not lit- 
eral history; if the story of Jonah and the 
whale is not literally true; if a real angel 
of the Lord did not smite the hosts of Sen- 


144 


THE OLD FAITH 


nacherib in a single night, but the figure is a 
metaphor for the plague arising from the 
noxious swamps of Pelusium — if, in short, 
a shadow of suspicion can be cast upon the 
most extravagant statement of Scripture, 
then the whole Bible is untrustworthy, and 
the Christian tradition and the individual 
Christian belief are without foundation. 

To these two classes of minds certain re- 
plies may be made in passing. To the men 
and women who accept the methods and 
results of modern criticism, and who, there- 
fore, decide that the Bible can have no 
authority other than that of any literature, 
it must be candidly answered, in the words 
of Principal Fairbairn, that “authority be- 
longs to the Bible, not as a book, but as a 
revelation ; and it is a revelation, not because 
it has been canonized, but because it contains 
the history of the Redeemer and our redemp- 
tion.” 1 It must also be said that the only 
authority to which the human mind dare sub- 
ject itself is the authority of the truth, and 
that the truth is truth wherever it may be 
found, and, furthermore, it is to be con- 


1 Fairbairn: Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 508. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


145 


fessed that the only element in the Bible 
which demands our assent is the truth of it. 
To the other folks who will throw overboard 
the whole body of the Scripture, if the most 
suspicious fragment is deemed questionable, 
the reply must be made that the truth can- 
not be thrown overboard, and everything but 
the truth ought to be. 

“Truth, in short,” as it has been put in 
one of the most suggestive chapters on the 
subject, “is the only thing which has author- 
ity for the mind, and the only way in which 
truth finally evinces its authority is by tak- 
ing possession of the mind for itself.” 1 

At this point the question, so much in the 
air if not under discussion, What of in- 
spiration ? will intrude itself on many minds. 
And to that it must be answered that, what- 
ever inspiration is, it cannot change the con- 
stitution of truth. That two and two make 
four is just as true whether you claim in- 
spiration for it or not. A thing is true not 
because it is inspired, but because it is; a 
thing is untrue not because it is uninspired, 
but because it is; and no amount of inspira- 


1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modern Mind, p. 97f. 


146 


THE OLD FAITH 


tion and no lack of inspiration can make the 
truth more true or the false less false. 

The problem, then, before the individual 
mind to-day, restless one way or another 
under the influence of modern biblical crit- 
icism, is not to decide off-hand as to the 
authority of the Scriptures, nor to define in- 
spiration and its result, nor to determine the 
date and authorship of a book, nor to build 
defenses around some miracle, nor to tear 
some miracle from the record; the problem 
is first to discover the truth of the Bible. 
And what is the test of truth? Not the form 
in which it is stated, nor the identity of the 
author of the form, nor the presence or ab- 
sence of certain miraculous elements in the 
formula. Outside of the realm of pure 
mathematics, which are so called because we 
are not able to apply them to the practical 
bread-and-butter business of life, there is no 
test of truth except the results which follow 
the practical application of the formula. 
How do we know that two and two make 
four? By accepting and applying the 
formula, with no previous question as to the 
probability of the truth, or the miraculous or 


IN THE NEW DAY 


147 


unmiraculous elements, or the authorship of 
the statement. How do we know the exist- 
ence of the force defined in the law of gravi- 
tation? By seeing, as Newton saw, an apple 
fall. The test of truth is its results ; and the 
truth of the Bible must be discovered or dis- 
proven by its results in life. 

It will not be out of place in a volume of 
this kind to quote two passages from the 
Gospel of Luke which will serve to illustrate 
the only adequate method of discerning the 
truth of the Bible : 

And it came to pass, when he drew nigh unto 
Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is 
called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying. 
Go your way into the village over against you; 
in which as ye enter ye shall find a colt tied, whereon 
no man ever yet sat : loose him, and bring him. And 
if anyone ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus 
shall ye say, The Lord hath need of him. And 
they that were sent went away, and found even 
as he had said unto them. — (Luke 19. 29-32.) 

And the day of unleavened bread came, on 
which the passover must be sacrificed. And he 
sent Peter and John, saying, Go and make ready 
for us the passover, that we may eat. And they 
said unto him, Where wilt thou that we make 


148 


THE OLD FAITH 


ready? And lie said unto them, Behold, when 
ye are entered into the city, there shall meet you 
a man bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into 
the house whereinto he goeth. And ye shall say 
unto the master of the house. The Teacher saith 
unto thee, Where is the guest chamber, where I 
shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he 
will show you a large upper room furnished: there 
make ready. And they went, and found as he had 
said unto them: and they made ready the pass- 
over. — (Luke 22. 7-13.) 

The problem imposed on the disciples in 
each of these instances is exactly the problem 
imposed on us — the discovery of truth. The 
various bypaths which are open to our minds 
as we face the Bible were open to their minds 
as they faced Jesus, at the very beginning 
of their journeys into the city. What reason 
had they for believing that they would find 
the colt? Was this certainty of Jesus the 
result of some miraculous adjustment he 
had wrought beyond their knowledge, or 
merely the result of a prearrangement of 
which they were ignorant? Was it likely 
that any man would permit two strangers 
to take his property in this free-hand 
fashion? And was it likely that any man 


IN THE NEW DAY 


149 


with a water pitcher would be at the place 
designated just at the time they would be 
there, when they did not even know just 
when they would arrive? When everyone 
in the city was preparing for the feast in 
much the same fashion, was it probable there 
would be only one man with a water pitcher 
there ? How would he recognize them as be- 
ing sent; and, in any event, was it at all 
likely that he would give two strangers pos- 
session of his guest room, without more 
definite and detailed identification? All 
these questions might naturally arise before 
them; and if they had sought to determine 
the trustworthiness of Jesus by the specu- 
lative method so disastrously applied to the 
Scripture by those who mistake the province 
and purpose of literary and historical crit- 
icism, they would never have gone into the 
city at all. They did nothing of the kind, 
however. They made a personal test. 
“They went, and found as he had said unto 
them.” Experience, in other words, is the 
test of truth. 

Somewhere James Russell Lowell has 
written, 


150 


THE OLD FAITH 


Experience is a dumb, dead thing; 

The victory is in believing. 

Which is true enough so far as it goes, but 
it is not complete ; the victory is in believing, 
but the victory of belief is its issue in expe- 
rience. Here, of course, one comes sheerly 
against the peril of the misinterpretation of 
experience; and the possible different inter- 
pretations which may be given of the same 
experiences by different minds. There is, 
for instance, a certain well-defined protest 
on the part of many men and women, whose 
sincerity is not to be questioned, against the 
special interpretation which Christian folk 
are in the habit of giving to daily life. The 
Christian mind is continually finding in- 
dubitable evidences of some providential 
leading in life, certain inscrutable marks 
of God’s interest and care. Good fortune 
comes to such a one, and he says, “God is 
good to me.” Disciplining experience of 
loss or disappointment or pain or sorrow 
falls; and he gravely affirms that God is do- 
ing everything for the best. He feels within 
him some rich and jubilant spirit and he 
bears witness then to the companionship of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


151 


the Lord. He feels some peculiar oppres- 
sion of the mind on account of which he for- 
goes certain purposes, or performs certain 
tasks of charity or service; and he says the 
Spirit was guiding him. He feels a certain 
humiliation and sense of rebuke after a hasty 
word, or ungenerous action or questionable 
activity, and he says that God was condemn- 
ing him. Side by side with this man is an- 
other who experiences the same fortune and 
ascribes it to his own labor and merit; who 
has the same trouble, but sees in it only the 
ill to which all flesh is heir; who is chari- 
table but recognizes no leading; who is un- 
generous and bitter and wrong and feels no 
condemnation; who is jubilant and finds the 
cause in his own physical health and social 
circumstances. He lives his life side by side 
with the Christian man, and the two lives 
coincide as to experience, yet he finds no 
evidence of God and recognizes no mark of 
Providence. Such a man protests against 
the interpretation which the Christian has 
given of his life. Enthusiast, fanatic, hyster- 
ical, hypocrite; such are the terms with 
which these folk are pilloried who witness 


152 


THE OLD FAITH 


to a divine experience. What answer can 
be made to this protest? First, that one’s 
own failure of vision does not give him the 
right to call his neighbor blind; and, second, 
that the man whose life is a series of events 
unconnected with any divine relationships 
is a man who may be looking accurately on 
the externals, but who has not the primary 
requisite for discovering the divine reality 
beneath. 

Imagine, what is quite possible, that as 
these two disciples journey toward the city 
where they are to find the colt, they are 
joined by two other men who know nothing 
of the presence of Jesus in Bethany and are 
ignorant of his words to the disciples. They 
will see the same incidents along the way, 
and, coming with the disciples, they will look 
at the same time on the colt standing with 
its patient mother; but the impulse to un- 
loose the animal will not come to them, and 
the spectacle of their companions’ boldness 
will amaze them; while if they know the 
ownership of the beasts they will remonstrate 
with these strangers for the liberty they are 
taking, and to the reply, “The Lord hath 


IN THE NEW DAY 


153 


need of him,” they will return only impatient 
inquiries and urgent opposition. Imagine 
two strangers overtaking the other disciples 
as they journey into the city, a few days 
later, to prepare the Last Supper. They 
will traverse the same public square, before 
their eyes the man with the water pitcher will 
pass, but the impulse to follow him will be 
wanting, and his upper room will not enter 
their thoughts ; the connection by which that 
man appears to them with the two disciples 
whom they have overtaken will not occur to 
them — in short, that mysterious procession 
of sublime events which are to culminate on 
Calvary will begin to move before their very 
eyes and they will be ignorant of it all. It 
does not follow, however, that the two dis- 
ciples are foolish or fanatical or in error 
when they interpret these common circum- 
stances after a special and personal fashion. 
The difference is in the observers; they 
have totally different bases of observation 
and judgment; the disciples have entered the 
city on certain conditions, have, as the begin- 
ning of their activity, a certain primary be- 
lief, and are acting under the impulse of that 


154 


THE OLD FAITH 


belief; and the common and the common- 
place reveal to them on every hand the mind 
and purpose of their Lord. 

In the same fashion the Christian of to- 
day who reads in all the experiences of his 
life a divine meaning and rests his life upon 
the reality of God’s interest in his common 
fortune, has premises of a certain kind; he 
has admitted into his conduct of experience 
a certain primary belief; he has taken life 
on certain clearly defined terms; and his 
experience of life vindicates his belief; he 
finds the affirmations of that primary faith 
— Providence, divine leading, the presence 
of the Spirit — coincident with his expe- 
rience. 

It is in that fashion that the Bible is to be 
put to the test. For what is the Bible? Lit- 
erature, you say, and the word is granted 
gladly ; but it is literature with a special pur- 
pose. It is not a book of science, though 
touching here and there on the objects of 
scientific research ; and it makes no claim to 
scientific accuracy. Its references to scien- 
tific themes are openly to illustrate and em- 
phasize certain kinds of truth totally out of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


155 


the realm of scientific investigation. It is 
not a book of history, though it contains 
large portions of deliberate and serious his- 
torical character, but those portions admit, 
on their very face, that their historical record 
is written with a special and not a historical 
aim. It is not a book of poetry, though some 
of the world’s greatest poetry is in it; but 
its poetry, like its history, makes a specific 
kind of an appeal, and that not a poetic 
appeal. What is the Bible? Not simply a 
body of literature; for when you have separ- 
ated it into its books and parts and kinds and 
forms, and judged them by purely literary 
and historical canons, there is a reality there 
which your instruments have not touched 
and which your standards have not reached. 
As Coleridge said, the Bible finds you, and 
finds you at greater depths than all other 
books. “What other book like this can 
awaken dumb or sleeping consciences, re- 
veal the secret needs of the soul, sharpen the 
thorn of sin and press its cruel point upon 
us, tear away our delusions, humiliate our 
pride, and disturb our false serenity? What 
sudden lightnings it shoots into the abysses 


156 


THE OLD FAITH 


of our hearts! What searchings of con- 
science are like those which we make by this 
light?” 1 

For the Bible, as a whole, presents, and 
claims to present, in the various forms of lit- 
erature which make its volume, by precept 
and example, by warning and exhortation, 
infallible principles only for the conduct of 
the spiritual life; and it is worthy of more 
than passing remark that what have been 
called the “myths of creation,” over which so 
many critical minds have stumbled, “are 
among the most searchingly religious parts 
of the book.” 2 If one will compare them 
with the parallel myths of creation current 
among other peoples, he will discover at once 
that there is something more than a record 
here; there is a spirit present. Out of its 
entire sweep of literature, legend and his- 
tory, psalm and sermon, biography and 
epistle, the Bible makes one distinct and cer- 
tain appeal — that of the spiritual to the spir- 
itual life. “Testing this sacred volume by 
human experience, we shall find no words too 


1 Sabatier, quoted by King: Religion as Life, p. 112f. 

2 Horton: My Belief, p. 123. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


157 


strong to express the difference in degree 
between the spiritual, enlightening, search- 
ing power of the Bible and that of all other 
religious books. Its influence confessedly 
stands unique as an inspiration to holiness 
and righteousness; unique in its quality of 
invoking in human hearts the consciousness 
of the Divine, the call to the higher life of 
the Spirit.” 1 

Coming to it, then, on its own terms, not 
unmindful of the fallibility of the human 
instruments through which it has been 
brought to us; but coming, not simply to 
discover the evidences and results of that fal- 
libility as seen in the historical improbability 
of certain episodes — without which the grand 
message would not be impoverished — or the 
unlikelihood of certain supernatural inci- 
dents, the only question concerning which is 
a question of evidence, for the power that has 
wrought the miracle of life surely could ac- 
complish any wonder of its manifestation; 
coming to the Bible, not to discover its falli- 
bility, nor, on the other hand, to vindicate a 
preconception of minute and mechanical ac- 


1 Seaver: Through Criticism to Christ, p. 39f. 


158 


THE OLD FAITH 


curacy in subordinate and casual details; 
but coming to it on its own terms, to discover 
its meaning for personal life — then one shall 
find certain definite personal results prom- 
ised, altogether out of the sphere of literary 
or historical criticism. One shall find that 
on certain conditions there are promised to 
the soul peace, forgiveness, providential 
care, consolation, the recognizable presence 
of God. By the conduct of life on the con- 
ditions laid down, and the vindication or dis- 
proof of the results promised, and in that 
way only, will you put the Book reasonably 
to the test. It is no argument against the 
truth of the Lord’s word in these incidents I 
have cited, that other folks did not find the 
colt waiting for them, or the man with the 
water pitcher to lead them to his house ; other 
folks had not the primary basis for such ex- 
perience. That one taking his place outside 
the sphere of Christian belief and allegiance 
has been unable to discover in life the Chris- 
tian content and character, that one ap- 
proaching the Bible from the critical or 
questioning point of view alone has not been 
able to discover the authority of the Book, 


IN THE NEW DAY 


159 


is an argument not against but for the Chris- 
tian claim. When one has fulfilled the con- 
dition of life such as the Bible demands he 
will be able to discern the realities on which 
the Bible stands; when one shall have taken 
upon his life the requisite attitude of belief 
and obedience he shall discover in life all 
those companionships of God to which the 
Bible witnesses and which one outside has 
not discovered. “They went, and found as 
he had said unto them.” Experience is the 
vindication of truth. 

Immediately this unqualified assertion de- 
clares itself inadequate as a test of truth. In 
the first place, there are whole areas of truth 
in the Bible which experience cannot touch, 
and not a little on which experience throws 
suspicion. We can never, for instance, test 
by experience the meaning of the number of 
the Beast in the Apocalypse or the accuracy 
of the unknown author of the book of 
Esther. “We must not overlook the inher- 
ent limitations of experience, even when in- 
terpreted in the largest way, as an instru- 
ment of verification. Experience cannot 
verify alleged historical events in a sacred 


160 


THE OLD FAITH 


book; they must be left to historical inves- 
tigation. It cannot directly verify the au- 
thorship of books; that is the province of 
criticism.” 1 But we need spend little time 
discussing the personal verification of the 
historical and scientific declarations of the 
Bible. It has already been shown — indeed, 
it is a truism of all thinking about the Scrip- 
tures — that neither the character nor the 
purpose of the Bible, as a whole or in its sev- 
eral parts, is historical or scientific, but spir- 
itual and ethical — in a word, religious. It 
stands or falls not by its scientific or histor- 
ical accuracy, but by its religious power. 
The great thing about it is “not that it can 
survive the assaults of hostile criticism, but 
that it is able to endure the assaults of life.” 2 
There are not a few folks who labor hard 
to discover and debate the difficulties in the 
Old Testament narrative; What were the 
“days” of creation ? Whom did Cain marry ? 
Why does one chapter say that Noah took 
seven animals of each kind into the ark and 
another chapter say that he took two? Did 


1 Peake: Op. cit., p. 470f. 

* Gordon: The Christ of To-day, p. 162. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


161 


the prophet’s ax head really float? — and go 
on down the long line of hoary difficulties. 
But while they halt and debate these ques- 
tions, they are not able to escape the fact that 
their personal responsibility toward the 
Bible does not depend on any or all of these, 
however they may be answered. The Bible 
for us — and every unprejudiced reader 
recognizes the truth at once — means its total 
spiritual, moral and ethical message com- 
pleted with the New Testament. That re- 
mark immediately takes us further. The 
New Testament is not merely a collection 
of books, but a series of intensely human 
documents, reflecting a generation’s social 
and religious phenomena, a series of docu- 
ments connected by the most constraining 
personal interest ; a diversity interwoven into 
a unique and living unity. It is a volume of 
historical and personal literature gathering 
around a singular and self -witnessing life. 
The total impression of the New Testament 
is not drawn from the events in history which 
it records, or the ethical and religious teach- 
ing which it preserves, but from the powerful 
and perfect Character to whom it is all due ; 


162 


THE OLD FAITH 


so that its complete meaning — and every 
honest reader of it recognizes the fact — is 
the life and person and work of Jesus 
Christ. Toward this unique and personal 
unity the Old Testament is also drawn as 
all the plunging rapids of Niagara are 
drawn into the resistless whirlpool toward 
which they rush. 

What is true of the New Testament imme- 
diately becomes true, by retroaction, of the 
entire body of Scripture; and every sincere 
reader well knows that his vital concern with 
the Bible is his personal attitude and re- 
sponse to Jesus Christ as foreshadowed and 
revealed. The question which everyone 
must face is not, Did this miracle happen? 
or, Is this history? or, Did John write this 
book? but What does this whole volume, 
what does this New Testament and what 
does this Christ say to me, in the personal 
and pressing experiences of my religious re- 
sponsibility and need? “The real and ter- 
rible test of the Word of God,” to quote 
again from Dr. Gordon, “is applied by the 
sinner who cries out for forgiveness, by the 
spirit crushed with the consciousness of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


163 


moral infirmity in the presence of eternal 
ideals, by the heart under the shadow of a 
great sorrow, by the soul looking in bewilder- 
ment into worlds beyond time.” 1 

Regardless of criticism and debate that 
rage in the remoter forums of a minute 
scholarship, the whole and human appeal of 
the Bible is an appeal not to knowledge but 
to life. It is because of that fact that its 
vindication is so easy and its constraints so 
unmistakable. Mr. Silvester Horne, in his 
biography of David Livingstone, is respon- 
sible for the statement that Sekeletu, one of 
the African chiefs, “had no desire for the 
Bible, fearing that it might compel him to 
content himself with one wife,” 2 which leads 
to the complementary truth so aptly illus- 
trated that the man who reads the Bible with 
a sincere and quiet spirit does not need any- 
one to tell him what portions of it are author- 
itative over his life, and so are revelations of 
God. 

It is said that a woman once told Mr. 
Moody that she was troubled with doubts as 


1 The Christ of To-day, p. 101. 
3 Op. cit., p. 60. 


164 


THE OLD FAITH 


to the Bible and asked him what she should 
do. And that wise prophet of practical reli- 
gion told her to read her Bible till she came 
to a command to her in it, and then not to 
read any more until she had obeyed that com- 
mand. And then to read further till she 
found another commandment, and to stop 
again till she had fulfilled that. The sequel 
of the story is of the amazing revelations of 
God which came to her as she read, and the 
satisfying experience which descended on 
her as she fulfilled the Word. One cannot 
recommend this uncompromising formula 
without qualification, for it is quite conceiv- 
able that so hard-and-fast a literalness would 
land one in dubious straits; but it is truly 
that spirit which commends itself to the 
modern mind and life as it was the effective 
principle in the mind of Jesus. “He saith 
unto them, Come, and ye shall see. And 
they went, and found as he had said unto 
them.” That is the unchanging law for the 
discovery of spiritual truth. “If any man 
willeth to do his will, he shall know of the 
teaching, whether it is of God.” It is in that 
way alone that one has right to test the Bible 


IN THE NEW DAY 


165 


or to investigate the life flowing from the 
Bible. For if, when one has met the condi- 
tions demanded by the Bible, nothing of the 
result it promises to those conditions comes 
to pass, then we may disbelieve it wholly — 
though its scientific utterances and historic 
statements be proven absolutely correct. But 
if, when we have fulfilled the primary condi- 
tions of belief and obedience, those grave and 
happy experiences come to pass within our 
lives; if we repent heartily for our sins, and 
rest wholly on the life and mystery of the 
death of Christ, and under the impulse of the 
new motives supplied by that new belief and 
repentance we lead new and humble lives; 
and if then there follow peace such as we 
had not before, and the sense of forgiveness, 
and a certain strength by which even the 
bitterest temptations are overcome, then we 
may be sure that the Book is true, and that 
Christ is present in the Spirit, and that 
Providence watches over our lives, and that 
somehow the mystery of salvation is an ac- 
complished fact, regardless of who wrote the 
documents, and what date they bear, and 
what miracles did or did not take place. 


166 


THE OLD FAITH 


The question for the moment, then, be- 
comes, Do such experiences follow the ac- 
ceptance of and obedience to the conditions 
which the Bible lays down? The incidents 
quoted from the third Gospel are indicative 
of the reply which may be written under- 
neath the innumerable lives of Christian 
men and women: “They went, and found 
even as he had said.” It had been thought 
to illustrate this with the narrative of some 
of the conversions of men, but where would 
we begin and where would we stop? The 
late Commander Alfred T. Mahan, at the 
time of his death the most noted authority on 
American naval matters, bore witness to his 
conversion in Boston by accepting the Scrip- 
tures on their own terms; and John Ruskin 
has told of the power of the Bible over his 
own life. “I resolved,” he wrote in a letter 
to his father, “that I would believe in Christ 
and take him for my Master in whatever I 
did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible 
was quite as difficult as to believe it; that 
there were mysteries either way ; and that the 
best mystery was that which gave Christ for 
a Master. And when I had done this . . . 


IN THE NEW DAY 


167 


I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never 
known before, at least to the same extent; 
and everything has seemed to go right with 
me ever since, all discouragements and diffi- 
culties vanishing, even in the smallest 
things.” 

Since Professor James’s Varieties of Reli- 
gious Experience, illustrations of what the 
fathers called the power of grace have once 
more become popular; what would have oc- 
casioned no purely intellectual curiosity or 
interest at the time of the Evangelical Re- 
vival or the Great Awakening of the forties, 
and are indeed the normal effects of the mul- 
tiplying evangelistic activities since the days 
of Moody, have recently been seized upon 
as a new field for literary hunting. Mr. 
Harold Begbie has proved most voluminous 
in his narratives of the Salvation Army, and 
the Water Street Mission has its character- 
istic book. One may therefore cite an in- 
stance recorded by the Rev. R. F. Horton, 
and cite it all the more properly because of 
his own sane and thoroughgoing sincerity. 

It is of a man serving a term of penal 
servitude at Durham, England, for at- 


168 


THE OLD FAITH 


tempted murder. He had been born and 
raised a Roman Catholic, but because it was 
supposed that Protestants were given some 
slight privileges Catholics in the prison were 
not, he had registered on his imprisonment as 
a Protestant, and so found a Bible in his cell. 
Having nothing else to do, he read it to pass 
away the time. But one day, reading the 
New Testament, he grew strangely inter- 
ested and the conviction came to him, as he 
has testified, that if this book were true, the 
priest was not, and he could pray to God for 
himself. Under the compulsion of the Book 
he prayed for forgiveness, and the response 
came. He vowed that when he should be 
free he would go back to the village where 
he had committed his crime and show that he 
was changed. He did so, watched with sus- 
picion by the police and the neighborhood 
until suspicion gave way to confidence. He 
began to speak as a local Methodist 
preacher, and at the time Dr. Horton re- 
corded the incident he was a missionary in 
India, known and loved and honored and 
abundantly successful . 1 Any evangelical 


1 Horton: My Belief, p. 120. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


169 


pastor can cite similar instances, and the 
records of the noble company of the evan- 
gelists are replete with authenticated ac- 
counts of personal transformations as note- 
worthy ; and not from what we call the lower 
orders only, but from the most cultured areas 
of society. “And this surely is the true mir- 
acle of the Bible : that a book slowly put to- 
gether in a way that we are now coming to 
understand, bearing in it the traces of its 
human origin and growth, should yet have 
such power to bring God to men, to bring 
men to God.” 1 

A book which works in that way when 
accepted on its own terms must be true, re- 
gardless of the verbal and historical inac- 
curacies which minute and painstaking 
scholarship finds in it. Its truth must be far 
more vital and divine than that dependent 
on mechanical conceptions of inspiration and 
literal acceptance of all narratives, however 
improbable, with no discrimination as to 
source. And a book which, in its own sphere, 
works such permanent and tremendous ac- 
tivities in human life and character must be 


1 Jackson: The Preacher and the Modern Mind, p. 119f. 


170 


THE OLD FAITH 


tested neither in the cloistered coldness of a 
scholar’s study nor by the flippant challenges 
of half-ripe minds, nor by unyielding pre- 
conceptions as to what authority and inspira- 
tion and the faith of the fathers mean, but in 
the sphere of its distinctive activities and 
power. 

I have a life in Christ to live, 

But ere I live it must I wait 
Till learning can clear answer give 
Of this and that book’s date? 

Nay, rather, while the sea of doubt 
Is raging wildly round about, 

Questioning of life and death and sin, 

Let me but creep within 

Thy fold, O Christ, and at thy feet 

Take but the lowest seat. 


V 

CONCERNING THE CHURCH 


And when the living creatures went, the wheels 
went beside them; and when the living creatures 
were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were 
lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to go, 
they went; thither was the spirit to go: and the 
wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit 
of the living creature was in the wheels. When 
those went, these went; and when those stood, 
these stood; and when those were lifted up from 
the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them: 
for the spirit of the living creature was in the 
wheels. — Ezekiel 1. 19-21. 


CHAPTER V 

CONCERNING THE CHURCH 

The new day and the faith developing in 
it, the new reading of the Bible and the 
newer conceptions of life evolving from and 
through them all, not only imply but make 
imperative a changed and changing theory 
and conduct of the Church. At this late day 
to say even that much is to render oneself 
liable to the charge of antiquity; for the gen- 
eration out of which we are just passing has 
probably been as industrious in its attacks 
on the Church as in any other form of intel- 
lectual activity. Criticism of the Church 
has been the sport of kings and the pastime 
of the honest poor. It has furnished maga- 
zines with copy and pulpiteers with popu- 
larity ; it has been a fount of eloquence to the 
self-appointed apostles of the oppressed, 
and a ready-to-hand excuse for the morally 
indolent or brazenly evil. The indictment of 
the Church at the bar of public opinion by 
173 


174 


THE OLD FAITH 


the vociferous voices of present-day criticism 
has lacked neither definiteness of charge nor 
number of counts. The Church, so runs the 
accusation, is active in immaterial things, in 
dogmas and forms and bloodless meditations 
on remote themes. It exercises perhaps 
some oblique influence on minor segments of 
life, an influence which is negligible in the 
great and pressing currents which make up 
our human society and problem. The 
Church is moving, but it is in the bypaths of 
the world’s business; along half-forsaken 
walks of emotional and perhaps aesthetic in- 
terest; along narrow and inadequate roads 
of obsolete charities; or even in its most 
splendid and aggressive enterprise, the mis- 
sionary propaganda, which has at once the 
glamour of a crusade and the fascination 
of a business and professional challenge, it 
is hardly more than at the edge of the great 
national and social movements which are so 
stirring the peoples of the world. All 
around the Church to-day is the noise of the 
new warfares of humanity, the battle of 
brotherhood in industry, the passion of 
social readjustment, the insistent campaigns 


IN THE NEW DAY 


175 


against diseases which arise from social 
negligence, the commanding adventures in 
political reform, the delicate yet intrepid 
movements for the reorganization of a judi- 
cial system which has crushed its heart in the 
case-hardening of its forms — all the mani- 
fold and compelling interests that are inter- 
woven in our changing social life. All these 
are calling men and women to chivalrous 
activity on behalf of their disadvantaged 
brethren; the whole area of human life is 
swept with the strong winds of moral imper- 
ative and ideal; but the Church is lingering 
on the edge of reality, singing of remote and 
impractical experiences. These are some of 
the charges which the most honest, and some- 
times the kindest, of the Church’s critics 
bring against it. 

And this criticism of the Church, while 
generally exaggerated and often irrelevant, 
and not infrequently ludicrous, has had 
nevertheless a very real cause. One of the 
few temperate and sensible remarks discov- 
erable in Mr. E. F. Blanchard’s passing 
volume on The Readjusted Church, puts the 
case against the Church almost accurately. 


176 


THE OLD FAITH 


“The present defects/’ he writes, “are 
threefold — the one-sided conception of the 
meaning of religion; the out-of-date methods 
which become an open door to corruption 
and evil, and the nonprogressive character 
of the Church whereby she fails to fulfill her 
whole mission in the present-day advance- 
ment of society.” 1 The corruption and evil 
which the author claims to find from the 
methods of the Church are more imag- 
inary than real, and, at the worst, neg- 
ative rather than positive; and it would be 
quite difficult to find any satisfactory una- 
nimity as to what methods will fulfill “her 
whole mission in the present-day advance- 
ment of society.” But the criticism is at 
heart sound, and out of the stream of criti- 
cism, honest and searching and reverent, as 
well as blatant and foolish and hostile, which 
has been poured upon it for the past genera- 
tion, slowly at first but now with accelerated 
motion, a new form and method of church 
life are shaping in and pressing on the 
changing social life and religious convic- 
tions of the world. What the characteristic 


*Op. cit., p. 15f. 


IN THE NEW DAY 177 

form, what the dominant method shall be; 
whether there shall come to pass any one 
form or method so preeminent as to give 
name and direction to the whole Church, the 
present writer does not make bold to say. 
The purpose of this chapter is far more 
modest; it is to suggest simply some con- 
siderations which, whatever may be the 
forms and methods the new age shall de- 
velop and employ, are involved in its very 
life. 

The fragment of Scripture presented at 
the beginning of this chapter will serve as 
a fitting introduction to or illumination of 
the pages to follow: “And when the living 
creatures went, the wheels went beside them ; 
and when the living creatures were lifted up 
from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. 
. . . When those went, these went, and 
when those stood, these stood; and when 
those were lifted up from the earth, the 
wheels were lifted up beside them: for the 
spirit of the living creatures was in the 
wheels.” It is a passage singularly germane 
to much of the present-day thought concern- 
ing the Church, and especially the Church 


178 


THE OLD FAITH 


that is soon to be. It reflects in terminology 
the spirit of our characteristic thinking, and 
implies very largely the fundamental and 
vital truth so commonly overlooked and 
without which much of the modern Church 
program is patently inadequate. 

Ours is a wheel age. We speak and think 
and act largely in terms of machinery. The 
human spirit which, a few decades ago, 
found its supreme expression in literature 
and art and music, How signalizes its pres- 
ence and delineates its activity in the inven- 
tion and use of multiplying and stupendous 
machinery. Goethe, to go further back, has 
given way to Krupp. Cardusi has been el- 
bowed out of the way by Marconi; Haw- 
thorne, and Lowell, and Emerson and their 
immortal fellows have been crowded out of 
sight by Edison, and Westinghouse, and the 
Wrights. For the quieter recreations of the 
mind which gave to yesterday its thought- 
fulness, we deafen thought amid the in- 
numerable tumult of the motor car. That 
immortal scene in Helen’s Babies where 
Toddy desires to see the wheels go round 
is the unintentioned picture and personifica- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


179 


tion of our present day. Our language is 
drenched with the atmosphere of the factory ; 
it smacks of the machine shop. 

This intrusion of machinery into thought 
and life is not surprising nor to be hastily 
condemned. It is not now a matter for 
criticism but simply for recognition; the 
more easily and imperatively because it has 
affected other realms than those of current 
speech and common industry, influencing as 
well our conceptions of and attitude toward 
government. We have come to live and act, 
as every one knows, as if any evil in society 
large or small, could be rectified automat- 
ically by the machinery of easily enacted 
law. In the California Legislature of 1912, 
for instance, according to the public press, 
there were introduced four thousand bills 
seeking to regulate all sorts of matters, some 
of them as personal as the size of one’s 
chicken coop and the shape of one’s clothes. 
This obsession of the mechanical idea mod- 
ifies our social activities. We seek to meet 
conditions which call for improvement or 
obliteration by the appointment of a com- 
mittee and conduct ourselves not infre- 


180 


THE OLD FAITH 


quently as if the universe were to be regu- 
lated by statute. The first step and too fre- 
quently the last in many a worthy social 
movement is the calling of a convention, and 
few objects of observation are more interest- 
ing than the commendable misuses to which 
mass-meetings are put. 

Our age insists upon wheels; and so far, 
so good. But it imagines them to be inher- 
ently automatic, and there is no truly auto- 
matic machinery of law or government or 
industry. Machinery, whether it be a mate- 
rial creation to produce some physical com- 
modity, or a system of legislation, or an or- 
ganization of society, is only a tool. By 
itself it is a dead weight. There must be 
beside it and in it the living creature; and 
there is no efficiency or service in a machine 
of any kind whatsoever except as, in the 
words of this prophet quoted above, the 
spirit of the living creature is in the wheels. 

Here is the well-nigh fatal weakness in 
the larger part of the modern criticism of the 
Church; it is concerned, even when it most 
seems to emphasize the spirit, with the con- 
duct of the wheels; and it offers its rebuke 


IN THE NEW DAY 


181 


and presents its advice in the manner of the 
innocent or aggrieved bystander, with the 
air of one who gazes from the pavement at 
some spectacle which interests and provokes 
him, but for which he has not the slight- 
est responsibility. What, however, is the 
Church, and of what and whom is it made? 
The answer is that we are the Church; it is 
made of us: not simply of those who are 
recognized as the formal and recorded mem- 
bers of the organization, but of all of us 
whose lives are shaped by its inevitable, if 
unacknowledged influences, and who react 
upon it in the unescapable relationships and 
conduct of our experience. It is a far 
broader and more embracing fact than the 
visible and delimited institution we call by 
the name. “The history of our Western 
civilization was largely but the life history of 
a particular form of religion and of wide- 
extending and deep-seated social movements 
connected therewith.” 1 This implies inevi- 
tably a very real reaction of the social move- 
ments upon the form of religion which was 
thus connected with them; and it is at least 


J Kidd: Social Evolution, p. 91f. 


182 


THE OLD FAITH 


questionable as to whether the form of reli- 
gion has more affected the social drift which 
is expressed in our changing civilization, or 
the social drift more affected the form of 
religion. There has been always a very vital 
reciprocal influence. Government illus- 
trates the same truth. Americans have been 
born with an infatuation for democracy, and 
there is probably no intolerance like that 
which conventionally prevails in this country 
against the idea of monarchy. But there is 
nothing inherent in the one which guaran- 
tees its right to exist, and nothing inherent 
in the other to warrant its decease. It is 
worth asking, indeed, whether, if instead of 
the three Georges there had been a series of 
rulers like Victoria or Edward VII on the 
British throne, we would not still be colonies 
of the motherland. There were not lacking a 
few far-sighted English statesmen who per- 
ceived a better way, from the British view- 
point, than the course of enactments which 
drew to the Revolutionary War. To see 
democracy trying to stand on its own right 
of existence one needs to look at some of the 
republics of South America or at Mexico 


IN THE NEW DAY 


183 


since the exposure and abdication of Diaz; 
the former are dictatorships in everything 
but name, and at the time these lines are 
being written the latter is a 

Confused alarm of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night, 

out of the seething currents of which no man 
is wise enough to prophesy what figure will 
at last take shape. The strength of democ- 
racy is in the spirit of the democrats who 
compose it; the weakness of monarchy has 
always been the defective and distorted char- 
acters of the monarchs by whom it has been 
administered. 

The fancy of the Church as a sublime 
and changeless institution, having a certain 
real though ghostly and invisible form and 
a vast and mysterious life drawn from the 
immemorial past and indifferent to the vary- 
ing and multitudinous life of the passing 
age — that fancy has long since passed away 
save from the most mediseval minds. The 
Church draws its divine life from Christ, its 
divine and living Head, but in its forms and 
service and doctrine and characteristic ex- 


184 


THE OLD FAITH 


pression it is the creation and the creature 
of every generation. In an age when 
tyranny was the principle of government, 
and the obsession of the divine right of kings 
lay unrelieved upon the hearts of men, then 
God and the spiritual world were inter- 
preted after the same fashion, and there was 
the temporal lordship of the popes, or the 
Inquisition and the crime of heresy, or the 
immutable decrees. In an age when mon- 
archy had broken down of its own incompe- 
tence, or given way by slower movement to 
democracy, or had been restored but bound 
hand and foot with the new limitations a 
democratic ideal had fastened on the old 
monarchial figure, then independency of 
some sort or another sprang to life and 
power, and while their beleaguered brethren 
at home were making nonconformity to be 
felt, out from them the more pioneering spir- 
its crossed the sea and built those heroic and 
heartening religious democracies of New 
England Congregationalism. There is no 
changeless and abiding form of Church, 
apostolic or otherwise. There is the abiding 
spirit of Christ; and the form of institution 


IN THE NEW DAY 


185 


in which that spirit shall be manifest and 
effective among men is the work of a chang- 
ing humanity. Every age in a very real 
fashion makes its own Church or modifies 
the Church bequeathed it by its progenitors, 
as every age develops new ideals and activ- 
ities and character, or remains a more or 
less approximate counterpart of that which 
preceded it. It is profoundly true, as a 
modern preacher has put it, that “The man 
who is in the Church and mocks at it is both 
foolish and sinful — foolish because he de- 
rides himself; sinful because he could make 
it better if he would improve himself.” 1 
One can go even farther and say that the 
man who is outside the Church and sneers 
at it is both ignorant and cowardly — igno- 
rant because he does not realize that the 
Church is just what he permits it to be, and 
cowardly because he will not accept the 
Church’s living challenge to make it what it 
ought to be. “The spirit of the living crea- 
ture was in the wheels.” 

It is here, then, that the clue to the activ- 
ities of the modern Church are to be found; 


iB. F. Stockdale: Sermons, p. 119f. 


186 


THE OLD FAITH 


for the question which every member of the 
Church ought honestly to ask from the in- 
side, and every critic ought sincerely to ask 
from the outside, is not, “What is the Church 
going to do?” but, rather, “What am I go- 
ing to do?” Doubtless there are too many 
church leaders and too many individual 
church organizations still out of touch with 
the characteristic moods and movements of 
the present generation, but the Church as a 
whole is not to be indicted in this thorough- 
going manner. It would be easy to show 
that the fires of enthusiasm with which all 
the humanitarian movements have begun 
and have been maintained were kindled at 
the altars of the Church ; it would be easy to 
show, to change the figure, that the waters 
of human kindness now rising toward the 
flood in the multiplying agencies of con- 
structive and preventive as well as remedial 
brotherhood, have started in the divine 
stream that flows within the Church, though 
this, of course, is the very point in dispute, 
for the most specious charge against the 
Church is that other agencies are carrying on 
the vital and saving work of society: feder- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


187 


ations and associations and clubs, organized 
charities, boards of public welfare, labor 
unions, state benevolences and institutions, 
even industrial and commercial corporations 
— these, we are told again and again, are the 
effective agencies in the lifting of life to the 
higher levels of opportunity and recompense 
and experience. The Church, we are in- 
formed, has let its task and tools fall from 
its idle and withered grasp, and, like Bun- 
yan’s Pope, “can now do little more than sit 
in his cave’s mouth, grinning at pilgrims as 
they go by.” 

In reply to this, two remarks are to be* 
made. First, that so far from being true in 
the broad fashion of the modern indictment, 
the one great obstacle in the way of the spir- 
itual power and influence of the Church, as 
not a few men of the most catholic and 
modern spirit and interest have recognized, 
is the high-minded but unwarranted sur- 
render of the Church to the ethical revival 
which has so completely filled the horizons 
of our present-day prophets. That there is 
such an ethical revival now in progress, that 
it is terribly and sadly needed, and that it is 


188 


THE OLD FAITH 


the very hope and salvation of society and its 
institutions, few with eyes open to the new 
day will deny ; and that the Church must be, 
as never before, in the forefront of the activ- 
ities for the promotion of the new spirit of 
real democracy and brotherhood and indus- 
trial justice and good citizenship, is an 
axiom of common thought. But that the 
Church must do all of this as its first and 
supreme business ; that its conduct of purely 
social service — the most threadbare phrase 
in our current speech — is its one great task; 
that we are to resolve our churches into 
societies, clubs, federations, community 
leagues, self-improvement organizations, 
and transform our church life into a whole- 
sale administration of preventive philan- 
thropy and the reformation en bloc of a 
much-bewildered industrial order, after the 
ideals of young men who have drifted out of 
the pulpit and into the street and of others 
who have never been interested or sym- 
pathetic with the Church at all, is an ut- 
terly dangerous as well as foolish fallacy of 
much present-day agitation. Whatever the 
Church is to do, it must never abandon its 


IN THE NEW DAY 


189 


primary duty, not to administer life as by a 
machine, but to leaven life by truth incar- 
nated in regenerated personalities. The 
Church must, indeed, be first in the field in 
any and every opportunity for the promo- 
tion of good citizenship, good society, good 
business, good amusements; for the promo- 
tion of anything and everything good what- 
soever. The words which aroused a Roman 
amphitheater to enthusiasm must blaze upon 
its front : “Nothing human is foreign to me” ; 
but it must never forget, as it has seemed of 
late to be forgetting, that into all these 
broadening opportunities for ministering to 
society, it must go with a special and dis- 
tinctive gospel dominant and unmistakable 
upon its lips. These new activities are, after 
all, its opportunities, not its aim. It must 
renovate the world that is, but it must 
thunder on its renovation the terrors and the 
splendors of the world that is to be. 

The second remark to be made at this 
point follows hard upon what has just been 
said. It is that by as much as the social 
and educational work of the age is being 
done by individuals and institutions apart 


190 


THE OLD FAITH 


from the Church, by so much is there a wit- 
ness to the enlarging success of the Church 
itself. For the Church is here as a leaven to 
leaven society, not as an authority to compel 
it or a machine to crush it to a predetermined 
and inflexible form; and when on some high* 
mount of an unerring judgment the insti- 
tutions and individuals now doing the work 
the Church is charged with failing to do, are 
questioned as to the final sources of their 
inspiration and interest and sympathy and 
purpose, it will be seen that from the Church 
their spirit drew its strength and at the un- 
recognized altars of the Church their pur- 
pose and the inspiration for their tasks 
were formed. It was the Church whose 
voice spoke loudest for the moral issues 
of our war with Spain, as it was the 
Church which, half a century before, had 
sounded the clearest note concerning the 
Civil War. It was the Church which ham- 
mered hardest at the fetters of the slave, 
and while a section of it stood for quite the 
opposite point of view, it was against the 
judgment of Christendom at large and but 
a local illustration of the inextricable en- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


191 


tanglement of the Church with the society in 
which it stands. It is the Church which has 
hewed the wood and carried the water, which 
has marched and fought and bivouacked 
amid the laughter and corruption of the 
world, in the bitter warfare with strong 
drink. In the new crisis of an aroused and 
inadequately compensated industrial order, 
in the new emergency of widely organized 
commercialized impurity, in the new di- 
lemma of cumbersome and outworn forms 
of government, it is the Church which, 
through a hundred voices of men and insti- 
tutions, is speaking the conflict and the vic- 
tory which must be fought and won. And 
when one remembers how in every great 
movement of the Church for a mighty moral 
purpose it has been awakened, stirred, and 
at last led by a small but increasing number 
of envisioned people until the whole organ- 
ization advanced level with or ahead of the 
pioneering minority, it is occasion for satis- 
faction that the Church, amid all the criti- 
cism poured upon it, is so largely alive to 
the modern spirit and purpose and ideal of 
society. Cardinal Newman, in one of his 


192 


THE OLD FAITH 


Parochial Sermons, calls the Church “the 
Home of the Lonely.” It was that in a spe- 
cial way for him — a great, dim-lighted re- 
treat, where the broken soul could hide ; and 
it is that to-day in its measure and modern- 
ness, because it is still made up, in part, of 
the lonely. It is, however, vastly more. 
The lonely are in it now, not to nurse their 
loneliness amid the somber beauty of shad- 
owed aisles and flickering lights and the sob 
and wail of cathedral organs ; the lonely are 
in it now to lose their loneliness in a large 
and active life. The Church to-day, in the 
fine phrase of Professor Peabody, is “not so 
much an association of saints as an associa- 
tion of saviors .” 1 What, then, are the 
men and women in the Church and those out 
of it who are earnestly scrutinizing its pro- 
gram and movements, going to do with it in 
this pressing modern day? There are not a 
few of them, as has already been intimated 
in the foregoing pages, who would deny 
Professor Peabody’s statement. That, they 
would reply, is an ideal; the reality is far 
otherwise. It is the preponderance of saints 


1 Approach to the Social Question, p. 198. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


193 


rather than of saviors which draws their 
critical fire. The only adequate reply is that 
on which this chapter has been insisting, 
namely, that the spirit of the living creatures 
is in the wheels. If the Church seems but 
tardily awakening its membership to social 
duty, how many of them are being earnestly 
and intelligently aroused by the critics within 
and without its gates? If the Church seems 
indifferent to the moral issues in municipal 
government and life, how seriously are its 
critics interesting their comrades in those 
moral issues, and tearing away the fetters 
of tradition and hostility which so long have 
held the Church from direct participation in 
the practical affairs of society? If the 
Church is not sufficiently enlisting the youth 
and protecting the inexperienced from the 
perils and pitfalls of our present day’s too 
liberal social habits, how vigorously are those 
who recognize its failure inviting and warn- 
ing the young men and women of the times 
and constructing within the Church a more 
adequate security and strengthening a more 
sufficient inspiration? It will be said, natu- 
rally, that the critics of the Church are not 


194 


THE OLD FAITH 


to be expected to remain within what they 
believe to be a failing institution, though the 
most severe and valuable of them are within 
its membership and activity; but that fact 
does not alter the responsibility. The recog- 
nition of a fault implies an obligation. And 
it would be a quickening discipline if all of 
those who have refused to be identified with 
the Church and yet have asserted an inalien- 
able right to criticize what they have de- 
clined to help, should be compelled to answer 
frankly the question as to how far they have 
thrown their influence on the side of those 
moral issues for which the Church has con- 
tended and for which they have demanded 
its entire effort. How far, for instance, has 
the “practical business man,” who is quoted 
so incessantly in complaint of the Church’s 
inefficiency, favored his own free speech 
when it might cost him advertising, or fought 
a saloon when it might affect his trade, or in- 
sisted on law enforcement when it might 
have involved unpleasant publicity? Some 
such practical business man, noting the in- 
creasing number of houses given to vice in 
a neighborhood around a certain Church, 


IN THE NEW DAY 


195 


asked one of the women of the membership 
what the Church could do to help those girls? 
“When you men,” was the immediate reply, 
“quit compelling girls to work for four 
dollars a week, then the Church can do some- 
thing for them.” His interest in the girls 
and the Church’s relation to them ended at 
that point. If one is to be utterly frank 
about this matter of the Church and its 
critics, notwithstanding the perfectly just 
criticism which comes to it, the average man 
inside the Church and out criticizes it for not 
counteracting the wrong he persists in allow- 
ing or committing; he demands that it shall 
be courageous where he is cowardly and do 
the unpleasant work of which he is to reap 
the benefit while escaping the embarrass- 
ment of reform. The business of the 
Church, as one of its sympathetic but 
searching critics has said, is to “bring 
society and God together.” 1 But how can 
it do that unless society wants to meet God? 
And it may be laid down as a rule for the 
judgment of all pious profession both of 
individuals as such and self -constituted 


1 Mathews: Church and the Changing Order, p. 111. 


196 


THE OLD FAITH 


prophets claiming to voice the aspirations of 
the age, that society does not want to meet 
God until it is willing to pay the price of 
the encounter. The misinterpretation of the 
doctrine of free salvation takes many forms, 
but none more specious than the current pre- 
sumption that the Church is to renovate the 
world and sanctify its immediate member- 
ship without any regard for the attitude 
of the world and the cooperation of its 
membership. We may well remember an 
old Greek saying, “The gods sell us all the 
goods they give us.” 1 The wheels go, but 
only as the living creatures go. “Whither- 
soever the spirit was to go, they went.” 

The responsibility resting upon the 
churchmen of the day, and upon those who 
reject the name but are awake to the chang- 
ing conditions of society, is made the heavier 
and more ominous by the fact that the 
Church is going. To make use of a phrase of 
a singularly frivolous song of recent popu- 
larity, it may not know where it is going, but 
it is on the way. It is true, in part at least, 
that the Church has failed in the immediate 


1 Brierly, Ourselves and the Universe, p. 271. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


197 


past to enter upon the opportunity it had, 
as the men and women in and out of it failed 
to meet the privilege and obligation their 
new age and new thought opened to them. 
But it needs no prophet to realize that the 
Church is moving now. It is more domi- 
nant in the intellectual world than it has 
been in a generation. Of the two leading 
philosophic writers of the day, when all 
qualifications have been made, one is reem- 
phasizing the primacy of the spiritual life — 
the old message of the Church since the first 
century — and the other is making a new 
place for and a new insistence on the spirit- 
ual interpretation of the universe. Within 
the last five years one of the conservative 
British journals made the statement that of 
all the books published in England during 
the preceding twelve months more than fifty 
per cent dealt with religion and the Church; 
while a recent analysis of the number and 
kind of books published in the United States 
during the year 1914 shows that the volumes 
devoted to religion and theology number 
1,032, six fewer than those of sociology and 
economics, and only 24 fewer than those of 


198 


THE OLD FAITH 


fiction, which ranks first in total output with 
1,056 titles. The very criticism of the 
Church is indicative of the paramount place 
it occupies in modern life and thought. 
In practical concerns the story is of un- 
paralleled advance. The missionary enter- 
prise, for instance, is to-day more extensive, 
better equipped and manned, better organ- 
ized, and more successfully carried on, 
showing more results in the redemption of 
individuals and the illumination of society 
than ever before. The two great forces back 
of the unparalleled events which have trans- 
pired in China have been the Christian 
Church and the Western education it has 
brought and inspired. In our own country, 
immediately after the passage of the Webb 
bill by the United States Congress, in 1913, 
a piece of legislation which is universally 
regarded as the beginning of the end of the 
traffic in alcoholic drinks, the official publi- 
cation of the organized liquor interests said 
editorially that the organization and influ- 
ence of the Churches far surpassed their 
own and made certain the ultimate destruc- 
tion of the liquor business. Taken in con- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


199 


trast with the jocular and contemptuous pro- 
nouncements of these same interests less than 
twenty years earlier, this is highly signifi- 
cant. To cite one more illustration: the 
president of De Pauw University is respon- 
sible for the statement that a judge of the 
Supreme Court of North Carolina in a 
public address has declared “that it would be 
utterly impossible for the courts, in any 
adequate manner, to enforce the laws of the 
land but for the influence of the Church.” 1 
The real problem of the Church to-day is not 
concerned with its social task or its doctrinal 
faith, but with the awakening of its mem- 
bership within and its critics without to the 
recognition of their own responsibility. A 
membership and community awakened to 
the social vision which the leaders of the 
Church already have, and to the responsi- 
bility which the social ministry and inspira- 
tion the Church has exercised in the past 
lays upon them, will mean the power of the 
Church returned tenfold upon it for the 
splendor of a constructive service and an 
imperial conquest in the things of the spirit. 


i Grose: The Outlook for Religion, p. 113. 


200 


THE OLD FAITH 


The primary requisite for such activity 
on the part of men and women, as the fore- 
going discussion has suggested, must be a 
clearer understanding of the Church’s busi- 
ness in the world than is usually displayed 
by the people who rush into print and other 
publicity with their cut-and-dried plan of 
what the Church should be doing. The 
Church ought to touch and contribute to and 
in its measure fashion every form of human 
experience and activity — government, com- 
merce, industry, pleasure, education, health ; 
and to this we are all agreed. But the 
Church as it admits its responsibility thus 
far, dare- not end its responsibility here ; it 
must touch all these forms of experience and 
activity, not for the creation or direction of 
them for themselves alone, but as the instru- 
ments and agencies of something quite be- 
yond them. It must fashion and direct these 
in the interest of individual and social char- 
acter. The passionate reformer of the 
Church from without demands that it shall 
effect all these aspects and enterprises of 
life for themselves; if anything further is to 
eventuate, that is a matter with which he 


IN THE NEW DAY 


201 


is not concerned. He demands that the 
Church shall fight the battle of the working 
man for the sake of securing to him a larger 
share in the product of his labor, that it shall 
create or support or direct the amusements 
of men and women of certain social limita- 
tions for the sake of getting them amused; 
that it shall force its influence directly into 
the government of cities, states, and the 
nation for the sake of getting them gov- 
erned; anything more than these immediate 
issues are quite beside the way. But the 
Church’s business can never be simply to get 
men well paid, and nothing else; the well- 
paid man may be all the more a lustful man, 
or a selfish or cruel or turbulent man. The 
Church’s business can never be simply to get 
men and women amused, and no more. The 
men and women for whom amusements are 
provided may become thereby all the more 
frivolous and superficial in thought and 
materialistic in purpose and careless in the 
affairs of home and life. The business of 
the Church can never be solely to get men 
better governed and nothing else; the well- 
governed man may all the more easily be- 


202 


THE OLD FAITH 


come indifferent to other interests and issues 
than his own, a man of satisfied and sleek 
and indolent mind. The business of the 
Church is to get men and women well paid 
and responsive to the commensurate obliga- 
tions of their larger opportunity and com- 
fort. It is to get men and women amused, 
in order that they may react the more easily 
and effectively to the more serious concerns 
of human life and relationship and thought. 
It is to get men well governed, so that they 
may the more readily become and remain 
good citizens, and not only good citizens but 
good men. The supreme business of the 
Church is to make Christian character in 
time and for eternity, and it must use all the 
varied opportunities and interests of the age 
that now is as avenues and agencies of that 
one supreme business. 

That, it is obvious, can never be done 
simply by social service committees and 
organized efforts in social and political activ- 
ity and federation. It can be done only as 
men and women, inside the Church and out, 
avail themselves of the immeasurable ad- 
vantage of the Church’s history and organ- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


203 


ization, the authority of its message and 
meaning in the accumulated experiences of 
the race, the inspiration of its Bible, and the 
power of its pulpit, and, perhaps more than 
all else, the personal impact of its member- 
ship, thus envisioned and inspired, in grip- 
ping the men and women of the present day 
and its conditions, in those ways which they 
themselves have discerned to be the most im- 
mediate and effective. 

It goes without saying that the inspiration 
to all of this must come from the pulpit. 
The characteristic demand of the enthusi- 
astic and active participants in our genera- 
tion’s reform and social movements is that 
the preacher shall throw himself bodily into 
the practical working and organization of 
those reforms and social movements; and it 
is past gainsaying that many a preacher 
would be humanized in character and illu- 
mined in utterance if he should come into 
close and practical contact with the machin- 
ery and operatives of modern social activity. 
But there is a far greater, if less spectacular 
work for him to do. He is not to preside at 
board meetings nor take his place on the 


204 


THE OLD FAITH 


front rank of committees; but he is to study 
with so keen and sympathetic an apprecia- 
tion the conditions of his times and place, to 
coordinate so sincerely the various knowl- 
edge and ideal of his changing generation, 
to speak so truly and with so sane yet bold 
a message, that the men and women who 
hear him shall cry like the multitudes of old, 
“What shall we do?” This seems an easy 
program, but, on the contrary, it presents 
the hardest and most perilous of tasks. The 
rejection of the pulpit by the present gen- 
eration, to whatever extent that the pulpit 
is rejected, is due to two grave faults. First 
and most common, of course, is the pulpit's 
failure to appreciate the new age, not only 
as regards its social passion and program 
but as regards its intellectual life as well. 
There are still not a few preachers whose 
relation to current thought is implied in 
their ex cathedra utterances that evolution 
is godless and that they believe the whole 
Bible. To the ever increasing number of 
men and women who accept in whole or in 
part the principles of modern criticism and 
yet find the Bible the exhaustless source of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


205 


their spiritual life and Christ their personal 
Redeemer, and who discern in evolution the 
more amazing witness to the majesty and 
love of God, such utterances can have but 
one effect, and that obvious. But even worse 
in their repelling influence are the still more 
numerous preachers whose public utterances 
give no hint that they have been so much as 
touched by the day in which they live ; whose 
themes, vocabularies, illustrations, intellec- 
tual processes and presumptions are appar- 
ently as remote from the present generation 
as from the first century. 

On the other hand are those preachers of 
pure purpose and admirable enthusiasm and 
courage, across whose vision the wrongs and 
pathos of our social order have smitten so 
bitterly that they can speak of nothing else, 
can throw themselves passionately into 
nothing but immediate and manifold cam- 
paigns for social reform; whose pulpits are 
indeed prophetic, but so monotonous in their 
reiteration of the needs of the life that is 
that there is no whisper in their sanctuaries 
of the life that is to be; whose emphasis is 
so overwhelming on the material emergencies 


206 


THE OLD FAITH 


of society that the spiritual obligations, priv- 
ileges, and eventualities are overlooked. 

In the chapter which follows the subject 
of the preaching for the times will be con- 
sidered ; and the business of the preacher will 
there be more fully dealt with. Here it is 
enough to indicate briefly what his duty is 
as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the 
major portion of the community. For while 
the agencies which go to the forming of 
public opinion have greatly multiplied, on 
account of which it is freely said that the 
preacher is no longer a vital factor in the 
intellectual and social life of the age, if that 
is true it is because he has failed of the 
opportunity which the age most cordially 
offers him. 

It is to be emphasized again at this point, 
and repeatedly, that the supreme message of 
the pulpit remains what it always was — to 
proclaim the gospel of personal salvation 
through the life and death of the Divine 
Lord; but that message must be voiced in 
modern language, must be related to modern 
knowledge, and shown to be socially oper- 
ative in the preventive, constructive, and 


IN THE NEW DAY 


207 


remedial movements of modern brotherhood. 
With this clearly understood as the funda- 
mental purpose and program of the Church, 
the Church’s business, through its pulpit, is 
threefold. It is, first, following not an in- 
evitable but a convenient order, to translate 
the ever new readings of science into the 
language of the spiritual life, and to inter- 
pret the substance of the faith in terms 
harmonious with the new knowledge. 
Again, it is to relate religion to democracy 
in so vital a fashion that spiritual character 
and experience, whatever other expressions 
it may take, will inevitably find its imme- 
diate expression in the practical forms of 
good citizenship and in just and honest com- 
mercial and industrial relations. In the 
third place, and perhaps more important 
even than the former functions, if that be 
possible, it is to mediate between the scholar- 
ship of the college and university and the 
personal spiritual life, to coordinate the life 
of learning and of piety in a scientific yet 
spiritual exposition of the Bible, so that the 
wholly unnecessary contradiction between 
the college classroom and the Bible school 


208 


THE OLD FAITH 


and sermon shall be ended ; and the hosts of 
young men and women who come from insti- 
tutions of higher education shall not be 
asked to stifle their intelligence and deny 
the spirit, facts, and instruments of modern 
culture when they cross the threshold of the 
Church. 

With this as the occupation of its pulpit, 
the Church as an association of saviors will 
not long remain simply an ideal. It will be 
inevitably and intensely real. The spirit of 
knowledge, the spirit of democracy, the spirit 
of truth — for these, and not boards and com- 
mittees and platforms, are the character- 
istic instruments of the Church — through 
the practical insight and labor of truly awak- 
ened and saved men and women, will work 
out in large and satisfying measure the 
Church’s contribution to the justice and 
health and harmony of the now turbulent 
and bewildered social order. I have not for- 
gotten the presence of Christ and the Spirit 
in the Church; but Christ gets to men only 
as other men reveal him. The Spirit of God 
works in society and life only as he works 
through men who are in society and have 


IN THE NEW DAY 


209 


part in life. We are the tools of God ; toil- 
ers on the highway on which alone he has to 
travel to our brethren; channels through 
which alone his fructifying grace can vivify 
and ornament the vaster acreage of human 
experience and enterprise. 

The chapter has been emphasizing the 
truth that the character and activities of the 
Church depend upon the personal attitude 
of the men and women who compose and re- 
enforce it; but there is a parallel truth we 
have come utterly to ignore to-day, namely, 
that the life of society and the individual de- 
pends upon the Church as well. “The spirit 
of the living creature was in the wheels,” 
and “whithersoever the spirit was to go, they 
went”; but it is equally true that the spirit 
did not go without the wheels. There is a 
violent mood among those who are hostile to 
the Church; they say that the Church has 
lagged behind and they will leave it behind. 
We are warned from many a quarter that 
humanity, in its warfares of brotherhood, 
its passionate march 

On, to the bound of the waste. 

On, to the City of God, 


210 


THE OLD FAITH 


will abandon the Church as an outworn and 
useless thing. They make bold to challenge 
the Church, “Either come with us, or we go 
on without you!” And there are weeping 
prophets in plenty who cry pathetically over 
the impending doom of Zion. The real 
doom from that brave and confident attitude 
is not for the Church but for those who 
abandon it. The Church goes with humanity 
in its highest and hardest and holiest quests 
and conquests, or humanity cannot go. His- 
tory speaks plainly to the point that not a 
single great moral enterprise of man since 
Christ has been established without the 
Church’s interest and adventure ; not a single 
desolating power has come face to face with 
the Church and the influences springing 
from it but has eventually gone down to 
hopeless defeat. Moslem civilization, 
French infidelity, English deism, the institu- 
tion of slavery — all have been crushed and 
conquered beneath the wheels of a Church 
actuated by that infilling spirit, but a spirit 
which, without the Church, would have been 
an aspiration and perhaps a passion, but an 
indeterminate and footless thing. In our 


IN THE NEW DAY 


211 


impatience with the more superficial aspects 
of the Church and its forms we have well- 
nigh forgotten the abiding substance of its 
mysterious life. Its form is shaped and 
fashioned by every age as suits that age's 
spirit and discernment; but, without contra- 
dicting what was said earlier in the chapter 
concerning it as an institution, its substance 
is a permanent and divine reality which de- 
fies the temper of men's ignorance and the 
violence of their hostility. 

The Church's one foundation 
Is Jesus Christ her Lord; 

She is his new creation 
By water and the word: 

From heaven he came and sought her 
To be his holy bride; 

With his own blood he bought her 
And for her life he died. 

The mysticism of the language and idea may 
seem, at times, unsuited for our day, and 
there may be some to resent the upthrust of 
this old conception into our new and sput- 
tering programs of tireless activity. But 
the conception persists, as Christ abides and 
the New Testament makes its ancient ap- 


212 


THE OLD FAITH 


peal. To think that men will leave all this 
behind as a bit of rusted and obsolete ma- 
chinery, to think that men will get away 
from this and live any vital and permanent 
ethical and spiritual life, is to confess 
oneself either hopelessly ignorant of or 
congenitally blind to the patent witness of 
history and experience. When the Church 
does not save society nothing will ; when men 
break with the Church in order to save so- 
ciety they break themselves, illustrations of 
which are not lacking even as the words are 
being written. Men and women, however 
earnest and impassioned, have not the alter- 
native of inspiring and using the Church or 
working without the Church. They have the 
alternative of inspiring and using the Church 
or doing nothing permanent and effective in 
exalting the spiritual aims and activities of 
society and life. The spirit is in the wheels 
or it is nowhere ; and if the wheels do not go 
whithersoever the spirit is to go, not even thq 
spirit will go. But “when they went, I heard 
the noise . . . like the noise of great waters, 
like the voice of the Almighty, a noise of 
tumult like the noise of a host.” 


VI 

AN ADEQUATE EVANGEL 


. . . That a man stand there and speak of spir- 
itual things to men. It is beautiful; — even in its 
great obscuration and decadence, it is among the 
beautifulest, most touching objects one sees on the 
Earth. This Speaking Man has indeed, in these 
times, wandered terribly from the point; has, alas, 
as it were, totally lost sight of the point: yet, at 
bottom, whom have we to compare with him? 
... I wish he could find the point again, this Speak- 
ing One; and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly 
energy; for there is need of him yet! — Carlyle: Past 
and Present, p. 233f. 


CHAPTER VI 

AN ADEQUATE EVANGEL 

No man has more advice given him than 
the preacher. Like the profession of author- 
ship, or the editing of a paper, from some 
points of view the ministry seems to be an 
occupation singularly free from technicality, 
and preaching a matter of exceptional ease. 
From another aspect it appears to be a call- 
ing in which the masters exist only in the 
past, or are now engaged in enterprises out- 
side of the regular pastorate. On either con- 
ception the result is an amazing output of 
published counsel intended to make every 
preacher a paragon of pulpit effectiveness 
and administrative power. Any one, then, 
who attempts even a chapter on the subject 
of preaching is under the embarrassing dis- 
advantage of addressing men who very likely 
know more about the subject than he does, 
and who have good right, humanly speak- 
ing, to resent the intrusion of more advice, 
especially if it happens, as it very often does, 
215 


216 


THE OLD FAITH 


that the adviser has achieved no more suc- 
cess than they have. The problems of the 
pastor and the tasks of preaching are the 
easiest of problems and the simplest of 
tasks when observed from the safe distance 
of detached service. But to the man in the 
heart of the city, hearing the tramp of un- 
numbered feet going past his church doors 
to the gates of hell ; to the man in the fashion- 
able community, feeling the sting of the so- 
cial patronizing and artificiality in the atti- 
tude of a large proportion of his member- 
ship; to the man in the smaller town or 
country charge, knowing the arctic pressure 
of indifference outside and inconsistency in- 
side his church; to all of us w r ho feel the 
injustice of criticism sprung from the com- 
mercialized insincerity and ignorance of 
many present-day novelists and magazine 
seers, the problems and tasks have larger 
proportions. The modern Church is pressed 
upon by many and distracting, yet impera- 
tive obligations of service. The cause of 
good government, of the reinterpretation of 
truth in terms of modern science and litera- 
ture; the development of the social spirit 


IN THE NEW DAY 


217 


and the training of the membership to large 
missionary insight and benevolence ; the evo- 
lution of a modern Sunday school; — these 
are some of the activities with which the 
Church of to-day must be concerned. We 
modern preachers are set at the head of so 
much machinery, we have had our organiza- 
tions so multiplied that it seems to take al- 
most all our time to lubricate the works, and 
as William Adams Brown has tersely put 
it, “The institution which should be our serv- 
ant has become our master.” 1 All of which 
should convince the most “modern” type of 
preacher that his first business is to preach. 
The Church and the world undoubtedly need 
administration, pastoral oversight, social 
organization and activity, but first of all they 
need preaching. Everything depends on the 
pulpit. And in an age which emphasizes 
almost ad nauseam the importance of organ- 
ization, the remark of Charles E. Jeffer- 
son ought never to be forgotten, that “men 
who cannot preach have ordinarily little to 
organize.” 2 


1 Modem Theology and the Preaching of the Gospel, p. 251. 

* Building of the Church, p. 278f. 


218 


THE OLD FAITH 


The aim of preaching, of course, remains 
the same from age to age. It is to win men 
and women to the personal experience of and 
allegiance to Christ. It is to be, in a word, 
evangelistic. “The Christian minister,” as 
William Adams Brown has said in a single 
sentence in the volume just quoted, “exists 
for the single purpose of making real to men 
the purpose of God for the salvation of the 
world.” 1 This conception will do away with 
a far too popular idea of evangelistic preach- 
ing as a “simple gospel message,” in which 
the mercy of God will make up in some 
amazing manner for the unmerciful empti- 
ness of the preacher. The “simple gospel 
message” of which we have heard so much 
never really existed. What has been intended 
by the phrase is usually a collection of plati- 
tudes in scriptural accent put together with- 
out much labor, and amply illustrated by 
more or less relevant anecdotes of senti- 
mental nature; and, generally, the product 
has been simple enough from every point of 
view. But that is not the gospel. The 
gospel is Christ — the stupendous mystery 


^p. cit., p 252. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


219 


of God on earth, the amazing paradox of 
God dying and yet alive, the unfathomable 
wonder of men delivered from sin and seized 
for immortality; and there is nothing simple 
in it. It took all there is of God to make it 
possible, and when you read the story it is 
in terms of miracle, darkness over a cross, 
and sunlight streaming into a grave an em- 
pire could not keep shut. Real evangelism 
recognizes the magnitude of its terms, and 
always has a basis .in profound thought ; it 
always springs, if it is effective in any large 
and permanent way, from a deep back- 
ground of thoughtful, not “simple” preach- 
ing, though, of course, simplicity of expres- 
sion is the very goal of profound thought. 

It is quite obvious, of course, that there 
cannot be too great emphasis upon this busi- 
ness of evangelism as we have come to think 
of it, apart, of course, from any question of 
ways and means. The living Church is a 
Church to which are added continually those 
who are being saved; and the epochs of reli- 
gious power have been epochs of practical 
and successful evangelism. The evangelism 
of to-day, however, notwithstanding the 


220 


THE OLD FAITH 


marvelous numerical successes reported of 
special campaigns, and the repeated seasons 
of protracted efforts in individual churches, 
has not been sufficient as yet to redeem the 
Church from the charge of indolence nor 
turn the tide of what, particularly in the 
cities, is keenly felt to be its failing influence. 
These special campaigns have wrought large 
results in their immediate localities, and have 
contributed not a little to the rapidly in- 
creasing power ‘of the prohibition move- 
ment ; but they have not communicated their 
impetus and spirit from place to place until 
a characteristic wave of spiritual interest and 
intensity has swept the country. This re- 
mark takes into account the notable conta- 
gion and success of the Gospel Team Move- 
ment, originating in Wichita, Kansas, a 
movement, however, which up to the present 
is restricted to comparatively small area; 
while, on the other hand, the practical failure 
of the Men and Religion Forward Move- 
ment is also remembered. No one can say 
that the men who have led and are leading 
these campaigns with their varying successes 
are not as consecrated as their predecessors 


IN THE NEW DAY 


221 


were, and the aim and motif of their preach- 
ing has always the same fundamental appeal, 
shaped more or less to seize the characteristic 
temper of the age; but the evangelism of 
the pastor in his intermittent “meetings” and 
that of the professional evangelists in their 
mammoth “campaigns” alike too largely 
fail of the large and constructive results of 
the great revival movements of the past. 

The Lutheran revival followed the proc- 
lamation that the just shall live by faith; 
the Wesleyan movement sprang from the 
quickening gospel of the witness of the 
Spirit; the awakening under Jonathan Ed- 
wards was wrought by his and his col- 
leagues’ terrible preaching of New Eng- 
land’s awful God, a deliverance which rolled 
back the rising tides of American infidelity ; 
followed then the great revival led by Finney 
proclaiming the wrath of God; and, after a 
generation, the work of Moody with his mes- 
sages of God’s infinite love. Here is the dif- 
ference: the evangelism of to-day lacks the 
single and commanding message; it deals 
with pieces of truth instead of a whole 
mastering truth ; it incites men to moral ac- 


222 


THE OLD FAITH 


tions instead of overwhelming them with the 
inexorable spiritual order. The reasons for 
this may be several, but one of them, at least, 
is that we have not clearly apprehended the 
social nature of the antireligious spirit; we 
have not recognized, as our fathers did, that 
the spirit hostile to religion and the Church 
is a matter of the whole of society as well as 
an individual attitude. Wesley faced the 
sordidness and brutality of English society 
as a whole, as historians of the day present 
it; Edwards confronted the unbelief engen- 
dered by the influence of Thomas Paine and 
his fellows; Moody smote on the calloused 
conscience of a whole generation that had 
learned to harden itself against the orthodox 
fulminations of hell and eternal punishment. 
But the evangelism of our day has not felt 
the social nature of the antireligious spirit. 
It has no message for a generation but only 
for a neighborhood, and the results are 
neighborhood results. There is practically 
no body of doctrine in the preaching of the 
present-day evangelists. They deal largely 
with homilies, exhortations, ethical precepts, 
illustrations of past conversions, and tales 


IN THE NEW DAY 


223 


that draw tears; they accomplish an im- 
measurable good in the quickened lives of 
already Christian people and the conversion 
of men and women who are within easy reach 
of the immediate and special services. But 
they do not spring from nor create a perma- 
nent body of social seriousness and do not 
inspire a social earnestness in the things of 
God. 

It goes without saying that this is not a 
criticism of the evangelist or the evangel- 
istic campaign. Their task is not con- 
structive but inaugural. They are not to 
edify the Church or direct the community 
beyond the Church; they are to arouse the 
indifferent and subdue the hostile to the 
things of the spirit. Back of them, back of 
their evangelism of the occasion, there must 
be a fundamental and consistent body of 
Christian preaching, a coordinated and time- 
less, yet progressive Christian message of 
which the evangelism of the occasion shall 
be the concrete and smiting application. It 
is this body of coordinated and consistent 
preaching which is meant by an adequate 
evangel, and of this the chapter will attempt 


224 


THE OLD FAITH 


an exposition. It is to be said at once that 
the shaping of this vaster message and, with 
it, the creation of a social seriousness and 
interest in the things of God, are the business 
of the stationed preachers. They can feel, 
as no itinerant evangelist, or contemplative 
student, or distracted church official, the 
very pulse of everyday thought and life; 
and they can preach, week after week and 
month after month, an accumulating and 
constructive gospel, as no man with stated 
messages or unimpassioned books can ever 
hope to do. 

This adequate evangel which is our hope 
to-day will be, then, a body of consistent 
preaching creating a social earnestness in 
spiritual things. It will be drawn from and 
react in an individual experience of awaken- 
ing and penitence and aspiration and conse- 
cration to personal religious life. What will 
be the features of such preaching? 

First of all, there will be in it the note of 
authority. The word strikes strangely on 
our unaccustomed ears, for it is a bad time 
nowadays for authority in religion. It is 
getting to be a bad time for authority 


IN THE NEW DAY 


225 


anywhere. It lias gone from the home, 
and our cities are passing ordinances to 
regulate the conduct of young men and 
women after dark instead of bringing them 
up to a decent sense of self-respect. It has 
gone from the courts ; they can coerce us but 
they cannot command our reverence. Long 
ago it went away from the Church. The 
legend on the banner carried in the Law- 
rence strike of 1912 and a year later in the 
Seattle riots, as well as elsewhere, was a 
crystallization of one of the moods of the 
age: “No God and no Master.” But for all 
of that, there is an intrinsic authority in the 
Christian message, and that authority must 
speak again. No one took away the author- 
ity of the Church and the gospel; it was 
thrown away by the leaders of the Church 
and the spokesmen of the gospel. The 
writer is quite aware that we have innumer- 
able sages and infallible men who tell us that 
the pulpit lost its commanding position be- 
cause it was too doctrinal, because it dwelt 
too much on matters of mere belief rather 
than interesting itself in the immediate 
emergencies of conduct and life. But there 


226 


THE OLD FAITH 


has been no more thoroughgoing and fruit- 
ful fallacy proclaimed against or accepted 
by the preacher than this. The pulpit lost 
its authority when it ceased to speak author- 
itatively on the things in which it is supreme. 
The pulpit can be authority in only one 
realm — in the proclamation of fundamental 
moral and religious fact, in the announce- 
ment of the commanding and abiding obliga- 
tions of the spiritual mind and life, in a 
world where other obligations change with 
the changing years. The average pulpit 
speaks to-day of social service; and trained 
welfare workers and philanthropic experts 
regard it rightly as an amateur. It speaks 
of industrial ideals and activities; and the 
leaders of organized labor and the masters 
of corporate wealth regard it as an intruder. 
It speaks of those generous and pervading 
cultures of life to refined experience and 
character; and the professional teacher 
smiles with tolerant amusement from his 
chair of specialized knowledge. It plunges 
with reforming zeal into the windy arena of 
practical politics bent upon some service to 
the city or humanity at large; and expe- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


227 


rienced legislators and trained politicians 
sneer at the Church vote. It ought to go 
into all these realms and speak to all of these 
occasions — of that there is no doubt; but it 
can go and can speak at best only as a com- 
rade, and generally only as a servant. And 
it is the open secret of us all that in any 
movement for civic righteousness we count 
it the better wisdom to avoid the impres- 
sion that such movement originates with the 
Church. It can speak with authority only 
on the things of God; and the deeper the 
things, the more vital are they to the life of 
men indifferent to them, and the more 
authoritatively can it speak. 

This generation past, however, has seen 
the rise and vogue of a school of preaching 
which has too much seized on one element in 
the gospel and has emphasized it to the ex- 
clusion of all others; it has seized and em- 
phasized the message of tenderness, and has 
talked of the wooing note and the appeal of 
love, and has rhapsodized about loving men 
into the Kingdom. It has clothed its strained 
appeal in tears and pathetic illustrations 
and sobbing tones till a real man could find 


228 


THE OLD FAITH 


little to stir him to worthy convictions or 
conduct. Underneath a wholesale senti- 
mentalism the sword of the Lord has been 
lost ; the word of command has been drowned 
in tears of entreaty; and one would think 
the Christian life was of strange and doubt- 
ful value when it must coax and plead its 
place before men in such a fashion. The 
prophets entreat, but they thunder as well; 
they invite, but they command with a shout 
and a summons. John the Baptist will cry, 
“Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away 
the sin of the world!” but you can hear him 
driving home to the curious and impetuous 
multitudes in which most of us would have 
found much comfort to-day, the sterner 
epithet and question: “Ye offspring of 
vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the 
wrath to come?” There is no sob in his throat 
when he preaches ; it was a Kingdom at hand 
and the authority of the Kingdom that at- 
tracted and subdued the multitudes which 
thronged to his ministry. Jesus weeps over 
Jerusalem; but you can hear beside his sor- 
row a whole chapter of woes and warnings, 
and the relentless authority of moral judg- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


229 


ment beats through all the New Testament. 
I do not find Simon Peter wooing men at 
Pentecost. “Ye denied the Holy and Right- 
eous One, and asked for a murderer to be 
granted unto you, and killed the Prince of 
life . . . Repent !” That is his message. You 
can discern great tenderness in our brother 
Paul, but you will find no lightening of the 
stress of authority in all he has to say. “See- 
ing ye . . . judge yourselves unworthy of 
eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles.” 
Saint John is not for nothing called the 
Divine, and there is a strain of compassion 
that runs like music through all he writes; 
but he has sharp discriminations. “There is 
a sin unto death : not concerning this do I say 
that he should make request.” “We know 
that we are of God, and the whole world lieth 
in the evil one.” The hesitant and over- 
courteous modern preaching which, as Hugh 
Black condenses it, announces that “If you 
do not repent and believe, as it were, you 
may be damned, so to speak,” has no warrant 
in the New Testament and no recommenda- 
tion in its results. 

The age which has so rejected authority 


230 


THE OLD FAITH 


needs it now more than ever ; not the author- 
ity of an institution, though even that would 
be preferable to the license into which society 
seems to have fallen, but the insistent and 
undeniable authority of moral obligation 
and the inevitable command of the New 
Testament and Christ. One of our religious 
papers some years ago published a simple 
story of two young men returning from a 
lecture against Christianity delivered by a 
noted infidel. One of them said, “Well, he 
swept everything before him to-night, didn’t 
he?” The other answered, “There was one 
thing he did not touch.” “What was it?” 
“My mother’s religion.” If you will give to 
that invincible experience an adequate ex- 
pression; if you will make vocal the expe- 
rience of the vast majority of the men and 
women of God, it will be the note of com- 
mand. It does not plead with men to be 
deaf to the words of the infidel; it thunders 
its authority over life and into the souls of 
men so imperatively that the onset of unbe- 
lief does not even make its voice to be heard 
amid the higher summons and appeal. 

What we need, as preachers, in order to 


IN THE NEW DAY 


231 


preach once more the gospel of authority and 
command, is, if not a new, at least a revised 
conception of God and of Christ. 

I do not mean to intimate that our age is 
intentionally atheistic. As Dr. W. H. P. 
Faunce, in his Cole lectures, said, Men 
“grant the theistic argument, but live an 
atheistic life.” “It is not the denial of God,” 
said he, “that ails our generation, it is the 
slow fading of the vivid sense of God out of 
men’s lives.” 1 The generation in which we 
live has watched the universe expand so 
wonderfully, has seen the stars multiply and 
the solar spaces deepen past all comprehen- 
sion, and human history immeasurably 
lengthen so that the six thousand years of 
our fathers are but a holiday amid the mil- 
lenniums that have passed over earth; and 
its thought of God has not kept pace. Its 
world to-day is too big for its God of yester- 
day and it has no other God. John Fiske 
has somewhere written that as a child, when- 
ever the word “God” was mentioned he saw 
“the image of a venerable bookkeeper with 
white, flowing beard, standing behind a high 


1 What Does Christianity Mean? p. 61. 


232 


THE OLD FAITH 


desk and writing down the bad deeds of 
John Fiske.” Many a child’s notions of God 
have been of a gigantic man dressed after 
the fashion of the men in the Dore illustra- 
tions in the family Bible, sitting on a co- 
lossal throne with uncountable myriads of 
people all in robes bowing perpetually be- 
fore him. To hold such conceptions now, or 
the conceptions which have developed from 
them by the mental discarding of the details 
of clothes and occupation, to hold even the 
saner conceptions of God which honest but 
more limited knowledge of the world im- 
posed, is now impossible in a world which 
has been as magnified as modern science has 
magnified ours; and unconsciously, but no 
less fatally, for much of the present genera- 
tion “God is lost among his stars.” This, of 
course, is not the place for the formation of 
an exact and preachable and adequate doc- 
trine of God; but this much is not out of 
place, that the lesson to be learned from the 
failures of Herbert Spencer and the success 
of Bergson, from the dust of What-Is- 
Christianity? controversy, from the modern- 
ist movement in European Romanism and 


IN THE NEW DAY 


233 


the philosophical analyses of Eucken, is that 
humanity is searching for a greater concep- 
tion of God. The pulpit of the age is facing 
a task of reinterpretation, the beginning and 
the end of which, whatever may be the read- 
justments of thought which a reverent 
science finds necessary, we have in the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. To rein- 
terpret God in terms of personality, so great, 
so inevitable, so commanding, as to press 
down upon the moral life of men with the 
inexorable authority of a living presence, 
that is the task far back at the beginning of 
whatever evangelism the preacher may covet 
for special occasions and specific opportu- 
nities. 

That means inevitably that a more virile 
conception of Christ is needed than has been 
preached in many pulpits. “Nobody,” as Dr. 
Denney has said, “has any right to preach 
who has not mighty affirmations to make 
concerning God’s Son, Jesus Christ.” 1 No 
reference is intended here to the philosophic 
problems of the incarnation as thej^ are re- 
newed by the later readings of science, but, 


1 Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Expositor’s Bible, p. 41. 


234 


THE OLD FAITH 


more practically, the representation of the 
character of the Jesus of the New Testa- 
ment, who is the most virile figure in history 
when the New Testament is read aright. “I 
came not to send peace, but a sword,” 
is one of the unmistakable words of Christ, 
but we have let it drift almost entirely out 
of our estimate of his character. We have 
spoken and written and read so much of the 
tenderer qualities of Jesus that we have for- 
gotten the heroic in him. He has been made 
so much the Man of Sorrows that we have 
lost sight of the Son of God with power. 
But if one will put away his latent precon- 
ceptions of the effeminate Christ, formed 
largely by lifelong acquaintance with senti- 
mental imaginations of sacred art and mushy 
verses of too many of our sacred songs; if 
one will read the Gospels with an eye open 
to the facts before him there, he will see a 
figure vastly different from that which artists 
and song-mongers have produced. He will 
see a man sitting in front of his neighbors — 
the fiercest tribunal of personal character 
and the severest test of personal fortitude — 
in the synagogue, and reading a prophecy 


IN THE NEW DAY 


235 


of their anticipated Messiah, and then with 
all the sublimer and inspiring reaches of that 
rich national tradition in their minds, charg- 
ing against all the prejudices of acquaint- 
anceship and familiarity by saying, “To-day 
hath this scripture been fulfilled in your 
ears.” He will see a man walking boldly 
into the temple amid officers duly appointed 
and in the heart of a fellowship of unscru- 
pulous gain, bound together by the bonds of 
self-defense and personal profit, swinging 
his lash about him, overturning tables and 
driving the frightened, angered company 
before him as he would drive a panic-stricken 
flock. He will see a man facing enemies 
whom he knows to be pitiless, unscrupulous, 
and bent upon his death, and his words hiss 
like another whiplash as he lays bare their 
inmost thoughts and character — “Woe unto 
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” He 
will see a man coming out of a garden at 
midnight, with the marks of some sublime 
and unutterable tragedy upon his face, meet- 
ing a mob with staves and sullen voices and 
the ominous flicker of swinging lanterns, 
saying, “I am he.” He will see a man 


236 


THE OLD FAITH 


standing before a magistrate brutalized 
by race and profession and long since 
calloused to the finer feelings of compas- 
sion, hearing outside the shouts of men 
that clamor for his death; and to a specious 
question he deigns no reply, and to a threat 
he answers, “Thou wouldst have no power 
against me except it were given thee.” Can 
it be thought that the voice of such a one is 
always a voice of entreaty? G6d forbid that 
the infinite compassion in the heart of Christ 
should seem to be slighted, but there is rea- 
son to fear that religion too often has been 
made a mendicant when it should go as an 
ambassador with authority. We have put 
into our hymns a divine and saving tender- 
ness, but we have too constantly forgotten 
that the other side of love is wrath, and that 
love itself must have a searching and indu- 
bitable sternness. Christ’s voice is a com- 
mand. There is an end to God’s coaxing of 
men. He gives them judgment and will and 
a summons. Christ issues an order; you 
may take it or go. It is a young man of 
wealth who came to Jesus to discern an en- 
trance into the kingdom of God; one does 


IN THE NEW DAY 


237 


not read that Jesus sought him out and har- 
ried him to his knees. He came to Jesus and 
asked an entrance into the kingdom of God, 
and learned the meaning of it; and Jesus 
loved him. But when the young man turned 
away sorrowful, Jesus did not call him back. 
An opportunity and an order ! A vision and 
a summons! And for all his sorrow and all 
his self-destruction, Jesus had no other 
terms. 

With a greater God in a greater world 
than ever before; and a Christ of command 
and summons, the pulpit must sound again 
the older and authoritative note. The 
evangel of our day has stood too much like 
one asking alms amid indifferent popula- 
tions, calling mournfully to the passing 
throngs; and the populations are still indif- 
ferent and the throngs still pass by. The 
lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh and 
the pride of life still attract them ; an age of 
pleasure-seeking has made them pleasure- 
seekers. The break-down of the old author- 
ity of the home, the loss of the family altar 
from Christian firesides, the multiplication 
and cheapening of amusements, the widen- 


238 


THE OLD FAITH 


in g scope of State and municipal responsi- 
bility and interest in public welfare, the mob- 
passion of the industrial orders cherishing a 
deeply rooted hostility^ against the Church 
with its capitalistic sympathies, the fervor of 
socialistic ideals as a substitute for religious 
experience — all of these go trampling hot- 
footed over the invitations of a religion which 
only invites and a pulpit which only sug- 
gests and pleads. The world, perhaps some- 
what unconsciously but no less inexorably, 
demands leadership; it hears the masterful 
voice; its Jeremiahs weary it beyond pa- 
tience, but its Amos and Saint Paul com- 
mand it at their will. 

The first note in the preaching which con- 
stitutes an adequate evangel for to-day is 
this note of command. But the preacher has 
to concern himself not only with the tone of 
his preaching, its atmosphere and impress 
of authority, but with its impact on those 
who hear. The fault with all our failing pul- 
pits has not been that they have not con- 
vinced the reason. That, of course, has been 
too largely true, but it is not the fatal defect. 
The fatal defect is that they have not com- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


239 


pelled the will. The second feature of this 
adequate evangel is that it will command 
men to a worthy task. 

We live in an age which challenges all 
the strength and aspiration of men; an age 
in which new continents of opportunity are 
opening, new chivalries of public service are 
summoning, new worlds of knowledge and 
industry and achievement are inviting. The 
air of our day is electric with great changes ; 
it stirs and stings like the salt of the sea with 
the spirit of adventure and conquest. There 
is the quickening sense of surprises just 
ahead vibrant through all our social expe- 
rience. Our standards have magnified with 
the expanding of the world. Life, labor, 
and possessions, ambitions and lusts alike 
have reached colossal measurements. There 
is the intoxication of a greater greatness in 
our American experiment than ever before. 
No one alive to his day can escape the sum- 
mons. The men of the present world have 
lost nothing of the daring of the old heroic 
breed. The conquest of the arctic, the 
mastery of air, the making of an empire, the 
financing of a nation, redressing the world’s 


240 


THE OLD FAITH 


wrongs, the battle of an industrial order, the 
wedding of the oceans, the enterprises of 
foreign missions — these are the tasks that 
call once more for the Viking spirit, and 
something of the wine and iron of them has 
penetrated our commonest and most sordid 
living, so that the bondmen of the common- 
place redeem their drab and heavy days with 
dreams of mighty things that move around 
them. 

We are living, we are dwelling 
In a grand and awful time; 

In an age on ages telling 
To be living is sublime. 

The Church must come with a call to 
something as vast and commanding; the 
preaching and authority must offer a per- 
sonal venture not out of keeping with an 
age of stupendous standards and activities. 
We have made our gospel, oftentimes, too 
small; we have made it an isolated expe- 
rience ; we have emphasized the shortness of 
the step to be taken ; we have wasted tons of 
paper and oceans of breath in talking of the 
simple gospel, when the subject of it and the 
process of it is the biggest business God 


IN THE NEW DAY 


241 


could find to do. What, then, shall be the 
personal content of the preaching to beget 
an adequate evangelism to-day? Salvation, 
of course, and salvation from sin, but salva- 
tion which issues not simply in personal 
peace, or fearlessness of death, or a satisfied 
conscience, or an eternal heaven, or a busy- 
body sort of puttering at neighborliness, but 
salvation which, gathering together all of 
these in an ever-deepening experience and 
conduct, issues progressively in what, in the 
preaching of Phillips Brooks, who saw the 
truth from afar, would have been the su- 
preme dignity of the Christian life. 

Rightly expounded, the supreme dignity 
of the Christian life will open the vision of 
a task commensurate with the age in which 
we live, and preeminently commanding to 
the most masterful of the men who now re- 
gard the business of religion as a side issue 
for a woman’s occupation or the protective 
education of their children. “Thank God,” 
says Robert Browning, “I find it hard to be 
a Christian.” That is the note of the new 
and winning evangelism which must be lifted 
once again by our Christian witness and for 


242 


THE OLD FAITH 


which the weekly pulpit must prepare. The 
summons of the commanding Christ is to a 
conflict worthy all a man has. We have 
been more or less unconsciously paring our 
conceptions of Christian character, shrink- 
ing our standards of Christian conduct, 
dwarfing our measurements of Christian ex- 
perience, smoothing away the entrance to 
the Christian society, until there has been 
little to shock and grip men in our appeal. 
“Strait is the gate and narrow the way,” 
said Jesus; not, of course, in the sense of 
unyielding articles of creeds and relentless 
confessions of former days, but in the indu- 
bitable distinctness of the Christian witness 
and Christian life. John Bunyan, you will 
remember, saw armed men at a palace door, 
and one sitting at a table-side with his books 
and inkhorn to take the name of him that 
should enter. And he saw a man of stout 
countenance saying, “Set down my name, 
sir,” and then draw his sword and charge 
upon the armed men. And not until he had 
received and given many wounds, did he 
press forward into the palace. John Bun- 
yan is doubtless a back number; but in an 


IN THE NEW DAY 


243 


age which challenges as our age does, it is 
that vision of conflict and battle which men 
must see in the task to which the gospel sum- 
mons the individual soul. Every now and 
then some benevolent minded essayist sobs 
over the loss of the heroic out of life, and 
the impending peril of our becoming flabby, 
bloodless folk like Mr. Kipling’s allitera- 
tively flanneled fools, if the stimulus and in- 
spiration of war shall be done away. As 
these words are being written, however, the 
German troops are entering Brussels after 
two weeks of bitterly contested struggle, the 
French frontier is alive with allied forces, 
Russia is marching well-nigh a million men 
on Prussia, the English navy patrols the seas 
and English regiments are engaged on 
foreign soil, while the Japanese fleet awaits 
the word which spreads the most gigantic 
conflict of history from Europe to the Far 
East. The danger of an immediate end of 
war is not apparent, in spite of the person- 
ally conducted tours of peace conferences de 
luxe. But if any apprehensive essayist will 
master his fears long enough to attempt the 
Christ life as it is and ought to be lived, with 


244 


THE OLD FAITH 


its depths of sacrifice and its heights of vision 
and its breadth of consecration and its 
length of service, he will forget all about the 
necessity of war. That heroic note has too 
largely perished from our preaching and 
conception of the gospel; and we get in- 
stead, a Harold Bell Wright with his Call- 
ing of Dan Matthews, and a Winston 
Churchill with his Inside the Cup. It is 
reported that the latter got his theology from 
a noted American churchman, but it is obvi- 
ous that he made his preacher all by himself. 
As for Harold Bell Wright, he never seems 
to have glimpsed the meaning of the New 
Testament or the Church. His Dan Mat- 
thews is a hero whose experience is so futile 
that he cannot answer a criticism such as the 
average minister meets every month of his 
life ; a preacher who has cut the cleansing of 
the temple clear out of his New Testament, 
who conceives it to be heroic to whip phys- 
ically a man of whom morally he is afraid, 
and prefers to run away from a Church 
rather than spiritualize it. Dan Matthews 
is Gehazi among the prophets, and the sub- 
title of the book ought to be “The Spiritual 


IN THE NEW DAY 


245 


Biography of a Jellyfish.” It is, however, 
that conception of Christianity which the 
preaching of to-day must overcome ; and we 
have that wherewith to overcome it — a great 
message of a great task. Wendell Phillips 
answered a sophomoric remark that Jesus 
was weak, by saying: “Weak? Look at the 
men he has mastered!” It is a foolish boast 
of a few strangers to history and life that 
the progress of the world in civilization and 
its nobler ethics has been accomplished by 
men who were indifferent to the claims of 
the Christian life. They are wont to name 
Huxley and La Place and Shelley and Edi- 
son, and a few of the kind, but you can put 
to-day beside an Edison, Sir Oliver Lodge, 
Sir William Ramsay and Lord Kelvin, the 
three greatest names in modern physical 
science. Reference has already been made 
to the remark of President Remsen, of Johns 
Hopkins University — “The Christian life is 
the most scientific life I know anything of.” 
Beside an indifferent Darwin, you can put 
an impassioned Romanes and a sober- 
minded Wallace. Outside the eddies in the 
stream, the great current of modern poetry 


246 


THE OLD FAITH 


comes from the Christian Hugo, Tennyson, 
and Browning. For every licentious Lord 
Chesterfield or debauched James Fox, you 
have a Gladstone and Shaftesbury, a John 
Hay and James Bryce, and taken by and 
large, the destinies of the world are in the 
hands of Christian men. When the greatest 
American financier lay dead, they found his 
last will and testament a witness to the 
power of Christ over his inner life. No man 
ornaments the gospel, but great men become 
significant witnesses to its character. What 
won these men? A command and a task; a 
summons to big business for their souls. 
Their lives commanded; they themselves 
spoke as in authority. They were captured 
only by strength and surrendered only to 
superior force. 

Among the men of to-day the Church and 
the Gospel have their greatest and most 
inspiring opportunity. Never were the 
highways to splendid service so many, or so 
open; never were the areas of society so un- 
barriered to the influence of a Church with 
a command and a task, and so responsive to 
the impress of a positive Christian spirit. 


IN THE NEW DAY 


247 


Never were the demands of the world on 
the Church so imperative and high. And 
where the Christian witness has failed to win 
the men and women of the age, it is because 
the Christian appeal and program have 
seemed unworthy the adventurous and mili- 
tant modern temper. The world is calling 
for hard tasks and offering to men and 
women stupendous things; and it will have 
no gospel of an easy religion. To invite 
men to the Christian life and suggest that 
it is an easy and simple thing is to win a few 
narrow or burdened or broken souls with 
half a lie, but it is inevitably to repel the 
great mass of earnest folk who are hungry 
for hard things and looking for something 
worth while. 

When Lieutenant Hobson wanted seven 
men to attempt with him the sinking of the 
Merrimac at the supposedly certain loss of 
their lives, the sailors of the fleet volunteered 
literally by the hundred and had to be chosen 
personally. And the sailors who were not 
chosen offered their wages for months, and 
even for the cruise, for the chance to go; but 
not a man who had been selected would sell 


248 


THE OLD FAITH 


his opportunity of being blown to death. It 
was with truly infinite wisdom that Jesus 
set hard barriers in front of the discipleship. 
He knew what was in man. There is a 
Divine shrewdness in the gospel of the 
Cross. Men run from roses to grasp a 
sword; they refuse to sit on cushions, but 
will climb crosses with a song. And that 
gospel of the cross and cross-bearing must 
be interpreted in keeping with the colossal 
spirit of the age in which we live. There is 
a time in every life when the thought of rest 
is winsome and the vision of the harps and 
palms is like heartsease to the beleaguered 
and bewildered soul. But those are only 
individual moods. For winning a world and 
capturing a generation and seizing on so- 
ciety and creating in it a great social ear- 
nestness we want no palms and harps, but a 
cross and a trumpet. To the note of author- 
ity must be added the command to task as 
the second feature of the evangel adequate 
to the day. 

It would be a signal failure, however, if 
the impression were to be left that all the 
winsome beauty and appealing tenderness of 


IN THE NEW DAY 


249 


the gospel must be thrown away as an out- 
worn thing. The note of authority and the 
command to task are the preeminent features 
in the preaching of an adequate evangel ; but 
they will be utterly unfruitful if they are 
presented in a wholly stern and intolerant 
fashion. Bugles command regiments to 
charge on battle lines but there is a music 
in them which makes even battle sweet. 
W. IT. Morrison, in one of his sermons, 
quotes an old Jewish legend that in hell 
Satan was asked what he missed most of all 
that he had had in heaven before his fall; 
and he replied, “I miss most the sound of the 
trumpets in the morning.” The preaching 
of to-day must command like a trumpet but 
have a music in it like the winsomeness of 
harps. There will be this difference, never- 
theless, between the appeal which the gospel 
of to-day must make and that which for 
several years past has seemed so futile, it 
will be dignified both in source and form. 
A God as great as ours, a Christ as imperial 
as ours, a life as masterful as we must preach 
the Christian life to be, will have a tender- 
ness and consolation in their appeal in keep- 


250 


THE OLD FAITH 


in g with greatness and the mastery and the 
supremacy to which they call. I saw and 
heard one of the foremost of our Methodist 
preachers move a great audience to tears by 
a story of the faithfulness of a she-dog; and 
from those stirred emotions he thought and 
seemed to make much headway in the pre- 
sentation of Christ. It was a good story, 
but you thought of the dog and not of Christ, 
and the mood it evoked and the imagination 
it aroused, were very far below the mighty 
theme of the saving Son of God. The effect 
produced was evanescent — it was a specious 
tenderness thrust on those who heard by a 
tricky appeal, not to their need or the char- 
acter of God or the ministry of Christ, 
but to their pity; and the preacher mistook 
that transient sentiment for the hallowing 
emotion which ought to rise within, from 
sober contemplation of the profound and 
saving tenderness of God. The peril of such 
sentimentalism is that it deadens the souls 
of men to the legitimate and constructive 
appeal of the truth ; and we get therefrom a 
more hopeless kind of “gospel-hardening” 
than our fathers had. The third feature in 


IN THE NEW DAY 


251 


the preaching which constitutes an adequate 
evangel will be tenderness, but a tenderness 
as profound as the great themes from which 
it rises, as august as the God and the Christ 
of whom it witnesses, as dignified as the con- 
duct of experience and life to which it in- 
vites. 

These, briefly considered, are the features 
of effective modern preaching; but they are 
features of manner rather than of substance, 
marks of appeal rather than matter of 
thought. They are the qualities by which, 
through subtle agencies, the will is cap- 
tured. Before the will stands the buttressed 
stronghold of the reason, which must be 
taken, or the response of the will is hesitant 
and temporary, if it responds at all. The 
profound concern of the preacher will be not 
only with the manner but the matter of his 
message, not only How, but What shall he 
preach? 

What, then, will be the kind of preaching 
which is to be at once authoritative and com- 
manding to a task and appropriately tender 
in its appeal ? It will be what our theological 
textbooks and lectures call doctrinal preach- 


252 


THE OLD FAITH 


in g. It will not reproduce the stiffness of 
theological methods; it will not be the pre- 
sentation of sectarian difference or the expo- 
sition of fragmentary topics offering hom- 
iletical ease and applicability. It will be 
the presentation of those great fundamentals 
of the Christian faith and experience which 
lie like the granite structure of the range be- 
neath all the spurs and peaks of separate 
mountain formations. The preaching which 
permanently attracts and constructs the 
characters of men, the preaching which meets 
the basal need of every changing social hour, 
the preaching which has in it most of grip 
and seizure for the spiritually indifferent, is 
not, for any considerable period or abiding 
influence, the so-called up-to-date discus- 
sion of current events, which has its minor 
place in the modern pulpit, but the incisive 
and commanding exposition of the timeless 
truths of God and the soul. The doctrinal 
content of the preaching which inspired and 
prepared for the great revival periods of the 
past has already been suggested: Luther’s 
doctrine of justification, Wesley’s of the 
Holy Spirit, Edwards’s of the personality 


IN THE NEW DAY 


253 


of God, Finney’s of divine retribution; and 
it is still and forever true that the preach- 
ers who in their weekly pulpits most com- 
mand and capture men are doctrinal preach- 
ers. Frederick W. Robertson, Guthrie, 
Chalmers, Bushnell, Storrs, Dale, Bishop 
Simpson, Bishop Foster, Jowett, Morgan — 
their sermons are drenched in great doctrinal 
affirmations. We have been for some time 
in a day of so-called ethical preaching, a day 
in which the Church, as never before, has 
been awakened to its ethical duties; but is 
it not a singular coincidence that the time 
of the Church’s greatest practical activity in 
and for society is the time of its slightest hold 
and smallest influence over the thinking and 
conduct of society? The fault is not with 
the ethical conduct of the Church or its new 
crusade of social service ; it is in the fact that 
we have not originated and maintained our 
ethical activities in great doctrinal convic- 
tions. The evangelistic preachers of the 
past won their amazing victories over the 
consciences and wills of men by their tre- 
mendous proclamation of the great doctrines 
of the faith. And where will you find more 


254 


THE OLD FAITH 


authority, more command and inspiration, 
more tenderness of appeal than in them? 
What will more subdue and invite a way- 
ward soul than a commanding vision of the 
character of God? What will more quickly 
win a soul to penitence and prayer and sur- 
render than an appealing exposition of the 
atonement in Christ ? What will more surely 
summon a man to wholesomeness and dig- 
nity of personal living than a noble preach- 
ing of the incarnation? What will more 
woo and win a soul with a tenderness which 
is not pretty but august and splendid, than 
a triumphant declaration and defense of the 
resurrection? Out of what other themes will 
authority be so calmly voiced, will the stu- 
pendous task of Christian living so confi- 
dently assert itself, will a deep and welling 
tenderness arise to open the spirit of a man to 
the advent of the Spirit of God? To unfold, 
not in piecemeal fragments but in a sober 
yet illumined message, the fact and conse- 
quence of sin as science joins with revelation 
in disclosing it ; to take of the reenforcements 
of a physicist like Sir Oliver Lodge and pub- 
lish the New Testament doctrine of immor- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


255 


tality with the dews of a new certainty upon 
it; to reread the New Testament in the light 
of Josiah Royce, and Henri Bergson, as well 
as Orr and Denney and William Newton 
Clarke, and Haring, and to bring therefrom 
not a recurrent simple gospel but a great 
and compelling evangel of the spiritual 
order ; in other words, to light the ponderous 
and majestic doctrines of the faith with the 
glow of the newest thinking and at the chal- 
lenge of an expanding world — that is the 
surest constitution of an evangel to the age 
which is more and more impatient of the 
fragmentary and the superficial. 

This is a great task; and who is sufficient 
for these things? But the writer is con- 
vinced that our preaching has failed of the 
evangelistic note because we have cultivated 
the note rather than the evangel; we have 
been more intent on forms and phases than 
on the fundamental gospel we are commis- 
sioned to proclaim. Whatever place the 
evangelism of special occasions or the con- 
tinuous Sunday night service may occupy, 
our preaching which prepares and inspires 
it must be not a matter simply of invitation 


256 


THE OLD FAITH 


and altar and inquiry rooms; it must aim at 
the creation in society of a spirit for God as 
social and felt and fervent as our present 
gracious spirit for humanity. The contrast 
which has shocked and baffled us has been 
the vision of society as a unit pouring its 
energies of mind and heart and hand into 
the ethical reconstruction of life and almost 
as a unit indifferent to the Bible, scornful 
of the Church, and impatient of what has 
seemed the limited and fragmentary salva- 
tion proclaimed by the pulpit. We are to 
shape the world into the kingdom of God, 
to fashion an indifferent yet honest genera- 
tion into a holy priesthood. One may con- 
cur in any program of special features, in 
any use of particular periods, or any employ- 
ment of unstereotyped methods for the 
awakening and capturing of men and women 
to the Kingdom. The present chapter has 
not touched on these more familiar elements 
in our customary discussions of the theme, 
though they have their place. But these will 
have large and constant success only as they 
are projections in special directions and at 
special occasions of the greater and coordi- 


IN THE NEW DAY 


257 


nated body of preaching dominant in the 
steady business of the regular pulpit; and 
the more pressing task upon us who are im- 
patient for the evangelistic result is the cul- 
tivation of this greater preaching of the 
greater truth in the sublime routine of the 
Sabbath ministry. Preaching, not by a 
method or a phase of service, but as the 
presentation from the pulpit in forms an- 
swering the challenge and appropriate to the 
spirit of the age, of the full body of Chris- 
tian truth ; for the creation in the individual, 
but, more broadly, for the maintenance in 
society as a unit, of the perpetual acknowl- 
edgment of and passion for God — that is 
the substance of an adequate evangel for the 
day in which we live. 

And the author of these humble pages 
dares to believe he hears the footsteps of the 
coming Kingdom marching grandly down 
the files of time that is to be, and not now far 
off. It seems to him that we men of the pul- 
pit are continually finding our enduring 
message in the deeper things of God; that 
more and more the day of the sensationalist 
on the one hand and the dilettant on the 


258 


THE OLD FAITH 


other, is passing; that more and more our 
churches are returning to the older tradition 
and demanding that those who lead them 
shall be men of the pulpit rather than of the 
parlor and the marketplace. And more and 
more in the earnestness of multitudes of men 
and women unidentified with the institutions 
of religion, but thronging to the message of 
commanding preachers, as well as in the 
quieter loyalty of stable congregations in 
comfortable environments, he seems to 
recognize the heartening spirit of inquiry 
and interest in and response to the procla- 
mation of the deepest truths of the New 
Testament and the spiritual life. 





























































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